Bootstrap for order identification in ARMA(P,Q) structures

The identification of de order p,q, of ARMA models is a critical step in time-series modelling. In classic Box-Jenkins method of identification the autocorrelation function (ACF) and the partial autocorrelation (PACF) function should be estimated, but the classical expressions used to measure the variability of the respective estimators are obtained on the basis of asymptotic results. In addition, when having sets of few observations, the traditional confidence intervals to test the null hypotheses display low performance. The bootstrap method may be an alternative for identifying the order of ARMA models, since it allows to obtain an approximation of the distribution of the statistics involved in this step. Therefore it is possible to obtain more accurate confidence intervals than those obtained by the classical method of identification. In this paper we propose a bootstrap procedure to identify the order of ARMA models. The algorithm was tested on simulated time series from models of structures AR(1), AR(2), AR(3), MA(1), MA(2), MA(3), ARMA(1,1) and ARMA (2,2). This way we determined the sampling distributions of ACF and PACF, free from the Gaussian assumption. The examples show that the bootstrap has good performance in samples of all sizes and that it is superior to the asymptotic method for small samples