Asymptotic expansions for the moments of serial correlation coefficients

This work is concerned with evaluating the moments of a number of serial correlation coefficients which arise in various ways and where the observations are from the first order autoregressive Gaussian process with known zero mean. The forms considered have biases whose main parts (of order 0(n^-1) , where n is the sample size) are substantially different. They are the intra-class correlation,the maximum likelihood estimators and an estimator whose main part of the bias is sere. The moments are obtained as asymptotic expansions in terms of the parameter of the process and to terms of order 0(n^-3). It is found that removing certain end terms in the denominator of a serial correlation has the effect of reducing the magnitude of the main part of its bias considerably and in one case completely eliminating it. This work extends the results of various authors,e.g.Kandall(1954), Marriott and pope(1954) and white (1961) in the special cases of the first order autogressive process.