A New Estimation Technique for AR(1) Model with Long-Tailed Symmetric Innovations

Abstract

In recent years, it is seen in many time series applications that innovations are non-normal. In this situation, it is known that the least squares (LS) estimators are neither efficient nor robust and maximum likelihood (ML) estimators can only be obtained numerically which might be problematic. The estimation problem is considered newly through different distributions by the use of modified maximum likelihood (MML) estimation technique which assumes the shape parameter to be known. This becomes a drawback in machine data processing where the underlying distribution cannot be determined but assumed to be a member of a broad class of distributions. Therefore, in this study, the shape parameter is assumed to be unknown and the MML technique is combined with Huber’s estimation procedure to estimate the model parameters of autoregressive (AR) models of order 1, named as adaptive modified maximum likelihood (AMML) estimation. After the derivation of the AMML estimators, their efficiency and robustness properties are discussed through simulation study and compared with both MML and LS estimators. Besides, two test statistics for significance of the model are suggested. Both criterion and efficiency robustness properties of the test statistics are discussed, and comparisons with the corresponding MML and LS test statistics are given. Finally, the estimation procedure is generalized to AR(q) models.