Measuring Dispersion and Serial Dependence in Ordinal Time Series Based on the Cumulative Paired ϕ-Entropy

The family of cumulative paired ϕ-entropies offers a wide variety of ordinal dispersion measures, covering many well-known dispersion measures as a special case. After a comprehensive analysis of this family of entropies, we consider the corresponding sample versions and derive their asymptotic distributions for stationary ordinal time series data. Based on an investigation of their asymptotic bias, we propose a family of signed serial dependence measures, which can be understood as weighted types of Cohen’s κ, with the weights being related to the actual choice of ϕ. Again, the asymptotic distribution of the corresponding sample κϕ is derived and applied to test for serial dependence in ordinal time series. Using numerical computations and simulations, the practical relevance of the dispersion and dependence measures is investigated. We conclude with an environmental data example, where the novel ϕ-entropy-related measures are applied to an ordinal time series on the daily level of air quality.

Structural change detection in ordinal time series

Change-point detection in health care data has recently obtained considerable attention due to the increased availability of complex data in real-time. In many applications, the observed data is an ordinal time series. Two kinds of test statistics are proposed to detect the structural change of cumulative logistic regression model, which is often used in applications for the analysis of ordinal time series. One is the standardized efficient score vector, the other one is the quadratic form of the efficient score vector with a weight function. Under the null hypothesis, we derive the asymptotic distribution of the two test statistics, and prove the consistency under the alternative hypothesis. We also study the consistency of the change-point estimator, and a binary segmentation procedure is suggested for estimating the locations of possible multiple change-points. Simulation results show that the former statistic performs better when the change-point occurs at the centre of the data, but the latter is preferable when the change-point occurs at the beginning or end of the data. Furthermore, the former statistic could find the reason for rejecting the null hypothesis. Finally, we apply the two test statistics to a group of sleep data, the results show that there exists a structural change in the data.

Ordinal Pattern Dependence in the Context of Long-Range Dependence

Ordinal pattern dependence is a multivariate dependence measure based on the co-movement of two time series. In strong connection to ordinal time series analysis, the ordinal information is taken into account to derive robust results on the dependence between the two processes. This article deals with ordinal pattern dependence for a long-range dependent time series including mixed cases of short- and long-range dependence. We investigate the limit distributions for estimators of ordinal pattern dependence. In doing so, we point out the differences that arise for the underlying time series having different dependence structures. Depending on these assumptions, central and non-central limit theorems are proven. The limit distributions for the latter ones can be included in the class of multivariate Rosenblatt processes. Finally, a simulation study is provided to illustrate our theoretical findings.

Regime-Switching Discrete ARMA Models for Categorical Time Series

For the modeling of categorical time series, both nominal or ordinal time series, an extension of the basic discrete autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) models is proposed. It uses an observation-driven regime-switching mechanism, leading to the family of RS-DARMA models. After having discussed the stochastic properties of RS-DARMA models in general, we focus on the particular case of the first-order RS-DAR model. This RS-DAR ( 1 ) model constitutes a parsimoniously parameterized type of Markov chain, which has an easy-to-interpret data-generating mechanism and may also handle negative forms of serial dependence. Approaches for model fitting are elaborated on, and they are illustrated by two real-data examples: the modeling of a nominal sequence from biology, and of an ordinal time series regarding cloudiness. For future research, one might use the RS-DAR ( 1 ) model for constructing parsimonious advanced models, and one might adapt techniques for smoother regime transitions.