Solved – auto.arima warns NaNs produced on std error

arimarregression

My data is a time series of employed population, L, and the time span, year.

n.auto=auto.arima(log(L),xreg=year)
summary(n.auto)
Series: log(L) 
ARIMA(2,0,2) with non-zero mean 

Coefficients:
         ar1      ar2      ma1     ma2  intercept    year
      1.9122  -0.9567  -0.3082  0.0254    -3.5904  0.0074
s.e.     NaN      NaN      NaN     NaN     1.6058  0.0008

sigma^2 estimated as 1.503e-06:  log likelihood=107.55
AIC=-201.1   AICc=-192.49   BIC=-193.79

In-sample error measures:
           ME          RMSE           MAE           MPE          MAPE 
-7.285102e-06  1.225907e-03  9.234378e-04 -6.836173e-05  8.277295e-03 
         MASE 
 1.142899e-01 
Warning message:
In sqrt(diag(x$var.coef)) : NaNs produced

why does this happen? Why would auto.arima selects the best model with std error of these ar* ma* coefficients Not a Number? Is this selected model valid after all?

My goal is to estimate the parameter n in the model L=L_0*exp(n*year). Any suggestion of a better approach?

TIA.

data:

L <- structure(c(64749, 65491, 66152, 66808, 67455, 68065, 68950, 
69820, 70637, 71394, 72085, 72797, 73280, 73736, 74264, 74647, 
74978, 75321, 75564, 75828, 76105), .Tsp = c(1990, 2010, 1), class = "ts")
year <- structure(1990:2010, .Tsp = c(1990, 2010, 1), class = "ts")
L
Time Series:
Start = 1990 
End = 2010 
Frequency = 1 
 [1] 64749 65491 66152 66808 67455 68065 68950 69820 70637 71394 72085 72797
[13] 73280 73736 74264 74647 74978 75321 75564 75828 76105

Best Answer

The sum of the AR coefficients is close to 1 which shows that the parameters are near the edge of the stationarity region. That will cause difficulties in trying to compute the standard errors. However, there is nothing wrong with the estimates, so if all you need is the value of $L_0$, you've got it.

auto.arima() takes a few short-cuts to try to speed up the computation, and when it gives a model that looks suspect, it is a good idea to turn those short-cuts off and see what you get. In this case:

> n.auto <- auto.arima(log(L),xreg=year,stepwise=FALSE,approx=FALSE)
> 
> n.auto
Series: log(L) 
ARIMA(2,0,0) with non-zero mean 

Coefficients:
         ar1      ar2  intercept    year
      1.8544  -0.9061    11.0776  0.0081
s.e.  0.0721   0.0714     0.0102  0.0008

sigma^2 estimated as 1.594e-06:  log likelihood=107.19
AIC=-204.38   AICc=-200.38   BIC=-199.15

This model is a little better (a smaller AIC for example).

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