Computer-intensive rate estimation, diverging statistics and scanning

A general rate estimation method is proposed that is based on studying the in-sample evolution of appropriately chosen diverging/converging statistics. The proposed rate estimators are based on simple least squares arguments, and are shown to be accurate in a very general setting without requiring the choice of a tuning parameter. The notion of scanning is introduced with the purpose of extracting useful subsamples of the data series; the proposed rate estimation method is applied to different scans, and the resulting estimators are then combined to improve accuracy. Applications to heavy tail index estimation as well as to the problem of estimating the long memory parameter are discussed; a small simulation study complements our theoretical results.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053607000000064 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Stable marked point processes

In many contexts such as queuing theory, spatial statistics, geostatistics and meteorology, data are observed at irregular spatial positions. One model of this situation involves considering the observation points as generated by a Poisson process. Under this assumption, we study the limit behavior of the partial sums of the marked point process $\{(t_i,X(t_i))\}$, where X(t) is a stationary random field and the points t_i are generated from an independent Poisson random measure $\mathbb{N}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We define the sample mean and sample variance statistics and determine their joint asymptotic behavior in a heavy-tailed setting, thus extending some finite variance results of Karr [Adv. in Appl. Probab. 18 (1986) 406--422]. New results on subsampling in the context of a marked point process are also presented, with the application of forming a confidence interval for the unknown mean under an unknown degree of heavy tails.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000001163 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A comparison of block and semi-parametric bootstrap methods for variance estimation in spatial statistics

Efron (1979) introduced the bootstrap method for independent data but it cannot be easily applied to spatial data because of their dependency. For spatial data that are correlated in terms of their locations in the underlying space the moving block bootstrap method is usually used to estimate the precision measures of the estimators. The precision of the moving block bootstrap estimators is related to the block size which is difficult to select. In the moving block bootstrap method also the variance estimator is underestimated. In this paper, first the semi-parametric bootstrap is used to estimate the precision measures of estimators in spatial data analysis. In the semi-parametric bootstrap method, we use the estimation of the spatial correlation structure. Then, we compare the semi-parametric bootstrap with a moving block bootstrap for variance estimation of estimators in a simulation study. Finally, we use the semi-parametric bootstrap to analyze the coal-ash data

NoVaS Transformations: Flexible Inference for Volatility Forecasting

In this paper we contribute several new results on the NoVaS transformation approach for volatility forecasting introduced by Politis (2003a,b, 2007). In particular: (a) we introduce an alternative target distribution (uniform); (b) we present a new method for volatility forecasting using NoVaS ; (c) we show that the NoVaS methodology is applicable in situations where (global) stationarity fails such as the cases of local stationarity and/or structural breaks; (d) we show how to apply the NoVaS ideas in the case of returns with asymmetric distribution; and finally (e) we discuss the application of NoVaS to the problem of estimating value at risk (VaR). The NoVaS methodology allows for a flexible approach to inference and has immediate applications in the context of short time series and series that exhibit local behavior (e.g. breaks, regime switching etc.) We conduct an extensive simulation study on the predictive ability of the NoVaS approach and find that NoVaS forecasts lead to a much ÔtighterÕ distribution of the forecasting performance measure for all data generating processes. This is especially relevant in the context of volatility predictions for risk management. We further illustrate the use of NoVaS for a number of real datasets and compare the forecasting performance of NoVaS -based volatility forecasts with realized and range-based volatility measures.ARCH, GARCH, local stationarity, structural breaks, VaR, volatility.