Discussion of: A statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies: Are reconstructions of surface temperatures over the last 1000 years reliable?

Discussion of "A statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies: Are reconstructions of surface temperatures over the last 1000 years reliable?" by B.B. McShane and A.J. Wyner [arXiv:1104.4002]Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS398C the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Unit roots in moving averages beyond first order

The asymptotic theory of various estimators based on Gaussian likelihood has been developed for the unit root and near unit root cases of a first-order moving average model. Previous studies of the MA(1) unit root problem rely on the special autocovariance structure of the MA(1) process, in which case, the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of the data vector have known analytical forms. In this paper, we take a different approach to first consider the joint likelihood by including an augmented initial value as a parameter and then recover the exact likelihood by integrating out the initial value. This approach by-passes the difficulty of computing an explicit decomposition of the covariance matrix and can be used to study unit root behavior in moving averages beyond first order. The asymptotics of the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) statistic for testing unit roots are also studied. The GLR test has operating characteristics that are competitive with the locally best invariant unbiased (LBIU) test of Tanaka for some local alternatives and dominates for all other alternatives.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS935 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The extremogram: A correlogram for extreme events

We consider a strictly stationary sequence of random vectors whose finite-dimensional distributions are jointly regularly varying with some positive index. This class of processes includes, among others, ARMA processes with regularly varying noise, GARCH processes with normally or Student-distributed noise and stochastic volatility models with regularly varying multiplicative noise. We define an analog of the autocorrelation function, the extremogram, which depends only on the extreme values in the sequence. We also propose a natural estimator for the extremogram and study its asymptotic properties under $\alpha$-mixing. We show asymptotic normality, calculate the extremogram for various examples and consider spectral analysis related to the extremogram.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/09-BEJ213 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm