Variance stabilizing filters#

Abstract

In this paper new filters for removing unspecified form of heteroscedasticity are proposed. The filters build on the assumption that the variance of a pre-whitened time series can be viewed as a latent stochastic process by its own. This makes the filters flexible and useful in many situations. A simulation study shows that removing heteroscedasticity before fitting a model leads to efficiency gains and bias reductions when estimating the parameters of ARMA models. A real data study shows that pre-filtering can increase the forecasting precision of quarterly US GDP growth.