Analysis of seasonal level shift (SLS) detection in SARIMA models

This study aims at exploring correct identification of seasonal outliers using most commonly applied test statistics. We evaluate the performance of seasonal level shift (SLS) by means of empirical level of significance, power of the test for sensitivity in detecting changes, and the vulnerability to masking of outliers by misspecification frequencies. We observe that the size of SLS affects the sampling distribution of η_SLS (test statistics for SLS detection) in case of SAR (1) and SMA (1) model. The empirical critical values for 1%, 5%, and 10% upper percentiles are higher than the usual cut off points and the empirical level of significance is inversely related to sample size and the model coefficients. The empirical power of the test statistics is not satisfactory at small sample size, and for large model coefficient. η_SLS gets confused with IO. The potential list of types of outliers should retain both IO and SLS as a part of outlier detection procedure for most efficient results. We apply the method suggested by Kaiser and Maravall with five possible types of outliers, that is, AO, IO, LS, TC, and SLS, to a number of quarterly and monthly time series data from Pakistan.