do it best , economy and management.
Author : Daniel tulips liu . Copyright © tulipsliu.
Also , Copyright © Sebastian Ankargren , Yukai Yang
First ,Abstract
Abstract Time series are often sampled at different frequencies, which leads to mixed-frequency data. Mixed frequencies are often neglected in applications as high-frequency series are aggregated to lower frequencies. In the mfbvar package, we introduce the possibility to estimate Bayesian vector autoregressive (VAR) models when the set of included time series consists of monthly and quarterly variables. TWe provide a user-friendly interface for model estimation and forecasting. The capabilities of the package are illustrated in an application.
Keywords: vector autoregression, steady-state prior
1. Introduction
Vector autoregressive (VAR) models constitute an important tool for multivariate time series analysis. They are, in their original form, easy to fit and to use and have hence been used for various types of policy analyses as well as for forecasting purposes. A major obstacle in applied VAR modeling is the curse of dimensionality: the number of parameters grows quadratically in the number of variables, and having several hundred or even thousands of parameters is not uncommon. Thus, VAR models estimated by maximum likelihood are usually associated with bad precision.
2. Mixed-Frequency models
Suppose that the system evolves at the monthly frequency. Let be an monthly process. Decompose into monthly variables, and a -dimensional latent process for the quarterly observations. By letting denote observations, it is implied that as the monthly part is always observed. For the remaining quarterly variables, we instead observe a weighted average of . There are two common aggregations used in the literature: intra-quarterly averaging and triangular aggregation. The former assumes the relation between observed and latent variables to be
As the system is assumed to evolve at the monthly frequency, we specify a VAR() model for :
The VAR() model can be written in companion form, where we let . Thus, we obtain
where , and are the corresponding companion form matrices constructed from ;
It is now possible to specify the observation equation as
where is a deterministic selection matrix and an aggregation matrix based on the weighting scheme employed. The yields a time-varying observation vector by selecting rows corresponding to variables which are observed, whereas aggregates the underlying latent process.
2.1 The steady-state prior proposed by \cite{Villani2009} reformulates \eqref{eq:original} to be on the mean-adjusted form
where is an invertible lag polynomial. The intercept in \eqref{eq:original} can be replaced by the more general deterministic term , where is and is . The steady-state parameters in \eqref{eq:meanadj} relate to through . By the reformulation, we obtain parameters that immediately yield the unconditional mean of —the steady state. The rationale is that while it is potentially difficult to express prior beliefs about , eliciting prior beliefs about is often easier.
where denotes the gamma distribution with shape-rate parametrization, and denotes the exponential distribution.
The common stochastic volatility specification presented by \cite{Carriero2016} assumes that the covariance structure in the model is constant over time, but adds a factor that enables time-dependent scaling of the error covariance matrix. More specifically, it is assumed that
\begin{align}
\VAR(\epsilon_t|f_t, \Sigma)=f_t\Sigma,
\end{align}
where is a scalar, is inverse Wishart as in \eqref{eq:iw}, and
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
\log f_t&=\rho\log f_{t-1}+v_t\
v_t&\sim \operatorname{N}(0, \sigma^2)\
\rho&\sim \operatorname{N}(\underline{\mu}\rho, \underline{\Omega}\rho; |\rho|<1)\
\sigma^2&\sim \operatorname{IG}(\underline{d}\cdot\underline{\sigma}^2, , \underline{d}),
\end{aligned}\label{eq:csv}
\end{equation}
where denotes the truncated normal distribution with support , and is the inverse gamma distribution with parameters .




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