An Application of Nonlinear Time Series Forecasting

By means of a real application, it is seen how ARIMA forecasts can be improved when nonlinearities are present. The autocorrelation function (ACF) of the squared residuals provides a convenient tool to check the linearity assumption. Once nonlinearity has been detected, parsimonious bilinear processes seem rather adequate to model it. The detection of nonlinearity and the forecast improvement appear to be rather robust with respect to changes in the linear and bilinear specification. Finally, what bilinear models seem to capture are periods of atypical behavior or sequences of outliers.