Edge effects and efficient parameter estimation for stationary random fields

We consider the estimation of the parameters of a stationary random field on d-dimensional lattice by minimizing the classical Whittle approximation to the Gaussian log likelihood. If the usual biased sample covariances are used, the estimate is efficient only in one dimension. To remove this edge effect, we introduce data tapers and show that the resulting modified estimate is efficient also in two and three dimensions. This avoids the use of the unbiased sample covariances which are in general not positive-definit

Bridging the ensemble Kalman and particle filters

In many applications of Monte Carlo nonlinear filtering, the propagation step is computationally expensive, and hence the sample size is limited. With small sample sizes, the update step becomes crucial. Particle filtering suffers from the well-known problem of sample degeneracy. Ensemble Kalman filtering avoids this, at the expense of treating non-Gaussian features of the forecast distribution incorrectly. Here we introduce a procedure that makes a continuous transition indexed by γ∈[0,1] between the ensemble and the particle filter update. We propose automatic choices of the parameter γ such that the update stays as close as possible to the particle filter update subject to avoiding degeneracy. In various examples, we show that this procedure leads to updates that are able to handle non-Gaussian features of the forecast sample even in high-dimensional situation

Using the Bootstrap to test for symmetry under unknown dependence

This paper considers tests for symmetry of the one-dimensional marginal distribution of fractionally integrated processes. The tests are implemented by using an autoregressive sieve bootstrap approximation to the null sampling distribution of the relevant test statistics. The sieve bootstrap allows inference on symmetry to be carried out without knowledge of either the memory parameter of the data or of the appropriate norming factor for the test statistic and its asymptotic distribution. The small-sample properties of the proposed method are examined by means of Monte Carlo experiments, and applications to real-world data are also presented