True integer value time series

We construct an integer-valued stationary symmetric AR(1) process which can have either a positive or a negative lag-one autocorrelation. Nearly all integer-valued time series models are designed for observations which are non-negative integers or counts. They have innovations which are distributed on the non-negative integers and therefore obviously non-symmetric. We build our model using innovations that come from the difference of two independent identically distributed Poisson random variables. These innovations have a symmetric distribution, which has many advantages; in particular, they will allow us to model negative correlations. For our AR(1) process, we examine its basic properties and consider estimation via conditional least squares.