Spectral Subsampling MCMC for Stationary Multivariate Time Series with Applications to Vector ARTFIMA Processes

Abstract: Spectral subsampling MCMC was recently proposed to speed up Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for long stationary univariate time series by subsampling periodogram observations in the frequency domain. This article extends the approach to multivariate time series using a multivariate generalisation of the Whittle likelihood. To assess the computational gains from spectral subsampling in challenging problems, a multivariate generalisation of the autoregressive tempered fractionally integrated moving average model (ARTFIMA) is introduced and some of its properties derived. Bayesian inference based on the Whittle likelihood is demonstrated to be a fast and accurate alternative to the exact time domain likelihood. Spectral subsampling is shown to provide up to two orders of magnitude additional speed-up, while retaining MCMC sampling efficiency and accuracy, compared to spectral methods using the full dataset. Keywords: Bayesian, Markov chain Monte Carlo, Semi-long memory, Spectral analysis, Whittle likelihood.