A0527
Title: Inference of break-points in high-dimensional time series
Authors: Likai Chen - Washington University in Saint Louis (United States) [presenting]
Weining Wang - City U of London (United Kingdom)
Wei Biao Wu - University of Chicago (United States)
Abstract: A new procedure is considered for detecting structural breaks in mean for high-dimensional time series. We target breaks happening at unknown time points and locations. In particular, at a fixed time point, the method is concerned with either the biggest break in one location or aggregating simultaneous breaks over multiple locations. We allow for both big or small sized breaks, so that we can 1), stamp the dates and the locations of the breaks, 2), estimate the break sizes and 3), make inference on the break sizes as well as the break dates. The theoretical setup incorporates both temporal and cross-sectional dependence, and is suitable for heavy-tailed innovations. We derive the asymptotic distribution for the sizes of the breaks by extending the existing powerful theory on local linear kernel estimation and high dimensional Gaussian approximation to allow for trend stationary time series with jumps. A robust long-run covariance matrix estimation is proposed, which can be of independent interest. An application on detecting structural changes of the US unemployment rate is considered to illustrate the usefulness of the method.
