Paper detail

Bayesian Characterizations of Properties of Stochastic Processes with Applications

In this article, we primarily propose a novel Bayesian characterization of stationary and nonstationary stochastic processes. In practice, this theory aims to distinguish between global stationarity and nonstationarity for both parametric and nonparametric stochastic processes. Interestingly, our theory builds on our previous work on Bayesian characterization of infinite series, which was applied to verification of the (in)famous Riemann Hypothesis. Thus, there seems to be interesting and important connections between pure mathematics and Bayesian statistics, with respect to our proposed ideas. We validate our proposed method with simulation and real data experiments associated with different setups. In particular, applications of our method include stationarity and nonstationarity determination in various time series models, spatial and spatio-temporal setups, and convergence diagnostics of Markov Chain Monte Carlo. Our results demonstrate very encouraging performance, even in very subtle situations. Using similar principles, we also provide a novel Bayesian characterization of mutual independence among any number of random variables, using which we characterize the properties of point processes, including characterizations of Poisson point processes, complete spatial randomness, stationarity and nonstationarity. Applications to simulation experiments with ample Poisson and non-Poisson point process models again indicate quite encouraging performance of our proposed ideas. We further propose a novel recursive Bayesian method for determination of frequencies of oscillatory stochastic processes, based on our general principle. Simulation studies and real data experiments with varieties of time series models consisting of single and multiple frequencies bring out the worth of our method.