Bootstrapping the Local Periodogram of Locally Stationary Processes

Locally stationary processes are non-stationary stochastic processes the second-order structure of which varies smoothly over time. In this paper, we develop a method to bootstrap the local periodogram of a locally stationary process. Our method generates pseudo local periodogram ordinates by combining a parametric time and non-parametric frequency domain bootstrap approach. We first fit locally a time varying autoregressive model so as to capture the essential characteristics of the underlying process. A locally calculated non-parametric correction in the frequency domain is then used so as to improve upon the locally parametric autoregressive fit. As an application, we investigate theoretically the asymptotic properties of the bootstrap method proposed applied to the class of local spectral means, local ratio statistics and local spectral density estimators. Some simulations demonstrate the ability of our method to give accurate estimates of the quantities of interest in finite sample situations and an application to a real-life data-set is presented. Copyright 2007 The Authors