11,686 research outputs found
Multiscale Granger causality
In the study of complex physical and biological systems represented by
multivariate stochastic processes, an issue of great relevance is the
description of the system dynamics spanning multiple temporal scales. While
methods to assess the dynamic complexity of individual processes at different
time scales are well-established, multiscale analysis of directed interactions
has never been formalized theoretically, and empirical evaluations are
complicated by practical issues such as filtering and downsampling. Here we
extend the very popular measure of Granger causality (GC), a prominent tool for
assessing directed lagged interactions between joint processes, to quantify
information transfer across multiple time scales. We show that the multiscale
processing of a vector autoregressive (AR) process introduces a moving average
(MA) component, and describe how to represent the resulting ARMA process using
state space (SS) models and to combine the SS model parameters for computing
exact GC values at arbitrarily large time scales. We exploit the theoretical
formulation to identify peculiar features of multiscale GC in basic AR
processes, and demonstrate with numerical simulations the much larger
estimation accuracy of the SS approach compared with pure AR modeling of
filtered and downsampled data. The improved computational reliability is
exploited to disclose meaningful multiscale patterns of information transfer
between global temperature and carbon dioxide concentration time series, both
in paleoclimate and in recent years
Locally Stationary Functional Time Series
The literature on time series of functional data has focused on processes of
which the probabilistic law is either constant over time or constant up to its
second-order structure. Especially for long stretches of data it is desirable
to be able to weaken this assumption. This paper introduces a framework that
will enable meaningful statistical inference of functional data of which the
dynamics change over time. We put forward the concept of local stationarity in
the functional setting and establish a class of processes that have a
functional time-varying spectral representation. Subsequently, we derive
conditions that allow for fundamental results from nonstationary multivariate
time series to carry over to the function space. In particular, time-varying
functional ARMA processes are investigated and shown to be functional locally
stationary according to the proposed definition. As a side-result, we establish
a Cram\'er representation for an important class of weakly stationary
functional processes. Important in our context is the notion of a time-varying
spectral density operator of which the properties are studied and uniqueness is
derived. Finally, we provide a consistent nonparametric estimator of this
operator and show it is asymptotically Gaussian using a weaker tightness
criterion than what is usually deemed necessary
Empirical Validation of Agent Based Models: A Critical Survey
This paper addresses the problem of finding the appropriate method for conducting empirical validation in agent-based (AB) models, which is often regarded as the Achillesâ heel of the AB approach to economic modelling. The paper has two objectives. First, to identify key issues facing AB economists engaged in empirical validation. Second, to critically appraise the extent to which alternative approaches deal with these issues. We identify a first set of issues that are common to both AB and neoclassical modellers and a second set of issues which are specific to AB modellers. This second set of issues is captured in a novel taxonomy, which takes into consideration the nature of the object under study, the goal of the analysis, the nature of the modelling assumptions, and the methodology of the analysis. Having identified the nature and causes of heterogeneity in empirical validation, we examine three important approaches to validation that have been developed in AB economics: indirect calibration, the Werker-Brenner approach, and the history-friendly approach. We also discuss a set of open questions within empirical validation. These include the trade-off between empirical support and tractability of findings, the issue of over-parameterisation, unconditional objects, counterfactuals, and the non-neutrality of data.Empirical validation, agent-based models, calibration, history-friendly modelling
Multiscale Information Decomposition: Exact Computation for Multivariate Gaussian Processes
Exploiting the theory of state space models, we derive the exact expressions
of the information transfer, as well as redundant and synergistic transfer, for
coupled Gaussian processes observed at multiple temporal scales. All of the
terms, constituting the frameworks known as interaction information
decomposition and partial information decomposition, can thus be analytically
obtained for different time scales from the parameters of the VAR model that
fits the processes. We report the application of the proposed methodology
firstly to benchmark Gaussian systems, showing that this class of systems may
generate patterns of information decomposition characterized by mainly
redundant or synergistic information transfer persisting across multiple time
scales or even by the alternating prevalence of redundant and synergistic
source interaction depending on the time scale. Then, we apply our method to an
important topic in neuroscience, i.e., the detection of causal interactions in
human epilepsy networks, for which we show the relevance of partial information
decomposition to the detection of multiscale information transfer spreading
from the seizure onset zone
Estimating invariant laws of linear processes by U-statistics
Suppose we observe an invertible linear process with independent mean-zero
innovations and with coefficients depending on a finite-dimensional parameter,
and we want to estimate the expectation of some function under the stationary
distribution of the process. The usual estimator would be the empirical
estimator. It can be improved using the fact that the innovations are centered.
We construct an even better estimator using the representation of the
observations as infinite-order moving averages of the innovations. Then the
expectation of the function under the stationary distribution can be written as
the expectation under the distribution of an infinite series in terms of the
innovations, and it can be estimated by a U-statistic of increasing order
(also called an ``infinite-order U-statistic'') in terms of the estimated
innovations. The estimator can be further improved using the fact that the
innovations are centered. This improved estimator is optimal if the
coefficients of the linear process are estimated optimally
Supervised estimation of Granger-based causality between time series
Brain effective connectivity aims to detect causal interactions between distinct brain units and it is typically studied through the analysis of direct measurements of the neural activity, e.g., magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) signals. The literature on methods for causal inference is vast. It includes model-based methods in which a generative model of the data is assumed and model-free methods that directly infer causality from the probability distribution of the underlying stochastic process. Here, we firstly focus on the model-based methods developed from the Granger criterion of causality, which assumes the autoregressive model of the data. Secondly, we introduce a new perspective, that looks at the problem in a way that is typical of the machine learning literature. Then, we formulate the problem of causality detection as a supervised learning task, by proposing a classification-based approach. A classifier is trained to identify causal interactions between time series for the chosen model and by means of a proposed feature space. In this paper, we are interested in comparing this classification-based approach with the standard Geweke measure of causality in the time domain, through simulation study. Thus, we customized our approach to the case of a MAR model and designed a feature space which contains causality measures based on the idea of precedence and predictability in time. Two variations of the supervised method are proposed and compared to a standard Granger causal analysis method. The results of the simulations show that the supervised method outperforms the standard approach, in particular it is more robust to noise. As evidence of the efficacy of the proposed method, we report the details of our submission to the causality detection competition of Biomag2014, where the proposed method reached the 2nd place. Moreover, as empirical application, we applied the supervised approach on a dataset of neural recordings of rats obtaining an important reduction in the false positive rate
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