Parameter Estimation of Heavy-Tailed AR Model with Missing Data via Stochastic EM

The autoregressive (AR) model is a widely used model to understand time series data. Traditionally, the innovation noise of the AR is modeled as Gaussian. However, many time series applications, for example, financial time series data, are non-Gaussian, therefore, the AR model with more general heavy-tailed innovations is preferred. Another issue that frequently occurs in time series is missing values, due to system data record failure or unexpected data loss. Although there are numerous works about Gaussian AR time series with missing values, as far as we know, there does not exist any work addressing the issue of missing data for the heavy-tailed AR model. In this paper, we consider this issue for the first time, and propose an efficient framework for parameter estimation from incomplete heavy-tailed time series based on a stochastic approximation expectation maximization (SAEM) coupled with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure. The proposed algorithm is computationally cheap and easy to implement. The convergence of the proposed algorithm to a stationary point of the observed data likelihood is rigorously proved. Extensive simulations and real datasets analyses demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework.Comment: This is a companion document to a paper that is accepted to IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing 2019, complemented with the supplementary materia

A Rolling Optimized Nonlinear Grey Bernoulli Model RONGBM(1,1) and application in predicting total COVID-19 infected cases

The Nonlinear Grey Bernoulli Model NGBM(1, 1) is a recently developed grey model which has various applications in different fields, mainly due to its accuracy in handling small time-series datasets with nonlinear variations. In this paper, to fully improve the accuracy of this model, a novel model is proposed, namely Rolling Optimized Nonlinear Grey Bernoulli Model RONGBM(1, 1). This model combines the rolling mechanism with the simultaneous optimization of all model parameters (exponential, background value and initial condition). The accuracy of this new model has significantly been proven through forecasting Vietnam's GDP from 2013 to 2018, before it is applied to predict the total COVID-19 infected cases globally by day.Comment: Accepted paper at the 2020 International Congress of Grey Systems and Uncertainty Analysis (GSUA

Autoregressive-Model-Based Methods for Online Time Series Prediction with Missing Values: an Experimental Evaluation

Time series prediction with missing values is an important problem of time series analysis since complete data is usually hard to obtain in many real-world applications. To model the generation of time series, autoregressive (AR) model is a basic and widely used one, which assumes that each observation in the time series is a noisy linear combination of some previous observations along with a constant shift. To tackle the problem of prediction with missing values, a number of methods were proposed based on various data models. For real application scenarios, how do these methods perform over different types of time series with different levels of data missing remains to be investigated. In this paper, we focus on online methods for AR-model-based time series prediction with missing values. We adapted five mainstream methods to fit in such a scenario. We make detailed discussion on each of them by introducing their core ideas about how to estimate the AR coefficients and their different strategies to deal with missing values. We also present algorithmic implementations for better understanding. In order to comprehensively evaluate these methods and do the comparison, we conduct experiments with various configurations of relative parameters over both synthetic and real data. From the experimental results, we derived several noteworthy conclusions and shows that imputation is a simple but reliable strategy to handle missing values in online prediction tasks