ROBUST UNIT ROOT TESTS FOR SEASONAL AUTOREGRESSIVE PROCESS

The stationarity is one of the most important properties of a time series. We propose robust sign tests for seasonal autoregressive processes to determine whether or not a time series is stationary. The proposed tests are robust to the outliers and the heteroscedastic errors, and they have an exact binomial null distribution regardless of the period of seasonality and types of median adjustments. A Monte-Carlo simulation shows that the sign test is locally more powerful than the tests based on ordinary least squares estimator (OLSE) for heavy-tailed and/or heteroscedastic error distributions.