English

Beyond Whittle: Nonparametric correction of a parametric likelihood with a focus on Bayesian time series analysis

Methodology 2017-01-19 v1

Abstract

The Whittle likelihood is widely used for Bayesian nonparametric estimation of the spectral density of stationary time series. However, the loss of efficiency for non-Gaussian time series can be substantial. On the other hand, parametric methods are more powerful if the model is well-specified, but may fail entirely otherwise. Therefore, we suggest a nonparametric correction of a parametric likelihood taking advantage of the efficiency of parametric models while mitigating sensitivities through a nonparametric amendment. Using a Bernstein-Dirichlet prior for the nonparametric spectral correction, we show posterior consistency and illustrate the performance of our procedure in a simulation study and with LIGO gravitational wave data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.04846,
  title  = {Beyond Whittle: Nonparametric correction of a parametric likelihood with a focus on Bayesian time series analysis},
  author = {Claudia Kirch and Matthew C. Edwards and Alexander Meier and Renate Meyer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.04846},
  year   = {2017}
}