UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS

SEMINAR NOTICE

Guest Speaker:             Prof. Wensheng Guo             

                                               Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology,  

                                      University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

 

Title:                              "Multivariate Spectral Analysis Using Cholesky Decomposition"

 

 Date:                              Thursday, December  4, 2003

 Place:                             Room 2 Illini Hall

 Time:                             4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

 

                                                                                                Abstract

 

In multivariate spectral analysis, traditional methods first calculate the periodogram and then smooth it to obtain a consistent estimate of the multivariate spectrum. In order to guarantee that the final estimate is positive semi-definite, some constraints have to be imposed such as using the same smoothing parameter for all elements in the spectral matrix. This is a very restrictive constraint as different  elements may have different smoothness and require different smoothing parameters. We propose to smooth the Cholesky decomposition of a raw spectral estimate instead, which allows different smoothness for different elements. The final spectral estimate is reconstructed from the smoothed Cholesky elements, which is consistent and positive definite. More importantly, the Cholesky decomposition matrix of the spectrum can be used as a transfer function in generating time series whose spectrum is identical to the given spectrum at the Fourier frequencies. This not only provides us much flexibility in simulations, but also allows us to construct bootstrap confidence intervals on the multivariate spectrum by generating bootstrap samples using the Cholesky decomposition of the spectral estimate. We then extend this approach to multivariate locally stationary time series whose spectrum is assumed to be smooth in both time and frequency. A numerical example and an application to an EEG data set recorded during an epileptic seizure are used as illustrations.
 

*This is joint work with Ming Dai