Cointegrated Matrix Autoregression Models

Abstract: We propose a novel cointegrated autoregressive model for matrix-valued time series, with bi-linear cointegrating vectors corresponding to the rows and columns of the matrix data. Compared to the traditional cointegration analysis, our proposed matrix cointegration model better preserves the inherent structure of the data and enables corresponding interpretations. To estimate the cointegrating vectors as well as other coefficients, we introduce two types of estimators based on least squares and maximum likelihood. We investigate the asymptotic properties of the cointegrated matrix autoregressive model under the existence of trend and establish the asymptotic distributions for the cointegrating vectors, as well as other model parameters. We conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate its superior performance over traditional methods. In addition, we apply our proposed model to Fama-French portfolios and develop a effective pairs trading strategy.