SEMIPARAMETRIC INDEPENDENCE TESTING FOR TIME SERIES OF COUNTS AND THE ROLE OF THE SUPPORT

Abstract

This article considers testing for independence in a time series of small counts within an Integer Autoregressive (INAR) model, taking a semiparametric approach that avoids any distributional assumption on the arrivals process of the model. The nature of the testing problem is shown to differ depending on whether or not the support of the arrivals distribution is the full set of natural numbers (as would be the case for Poisson or Negative Binomial distributions for example) or some strict subset of the natural numbers (such as for a Binomial or Uniform distribution). The theory for these two cases is studied separately. For the case where the arrivals have support on the natural numbers, a..