Additive Outliers in Open-Loop Threshold Autoregressive Models: A Simulation Study

Abstract

The effect of additive outliers is studied on an adapted non-linearity test and a robust estimation method for autoregressive coefficients in open-loop TAR (threshold autoregressive) models. Through a Monte Carlo experiment, the power and size of the non-linearity test are studied. Regarding the estimation method, the bias and ratio of mean squared errors are compared between the robust estimator and least squares. Simulation exercises are carried out for different percentages of contamination and the proportion of observations on each model regime. Furthermore, the approximation of the univariate normal distribution to the empirical distribution of estimated coefficients is analyzed along with the coverage level of asymptotic confidence intervals for the parameters. Results show that the adapted non-linearity test does not have size distortions, and it has a superior power than its least-squares counterpart when additive outliers are present. On the other hand, the robust estimation method for the autoregressive coefficients has a better mean squared error than least-squares when this type of observations are present. Lastly, the use of the non-linearity test and the estimation method are illustrated through a real example.