Solved – Stationary processes for AR, MA, ARMA

arimamodelstationaritytime series

Depending on the parameters, the AR, MA and ARMA can be either stationary or non-stationary. For instance for an AR(1) process, if $|\phi|<1$, the process is stationary and else it is non-stationary. But why do we restrict ourselves mainly to stationary processes in the theory of AR, MA and ARMA?

I know that ARIMA can be used for non-stationary processes by differentiating the process until it is reasonably stationary but is it possible to fit directly to our non-stationary time series a non-stationary AR, MA or ARMA model?

From my understanding, it seems like if processes were not stationary, we would have a hard time estimating the mean, variance and autocorrelation of the process because they would change at every time step. This is to contrast to the case where the process is stationary, which implies more parsimony in the parameters to estimate for the same amount of data. Hence, if we estimate a non-stationary model, the quality would be very poor compared to the stationary case.

Are there other reasons why we consider only stationary processes for AR, MA and ARMA models?

Best Answer

Short answers:

  • We restrict ourself to the stationary region as on the non-stationary one ARMA processes become explosive (that is, they go to infinity)
  • It is possible to fit a non-stationary model to time series but that won't be an ARMA model (but it may belong to the family of ARMA models)
  • Non-stationary time series need to be at least locally stationary to be modelled. If they are not, we won't have enough observations at each time point to be able to make reasonable estimates. However, if we have a good "sceleton" (see e.g. Tong,H., Non-Linear Time Series) for the series we might be able to extract the non-stationary/nonlinear dynamics from the data and leave a stationary process behind to play with.
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