A Kullback-Leibler divergence based comparison of approximate Bayesian estimations of ARMA models

Autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models involve nonlinearity in the model coefficients because of unobserved lagged errors, which complicates the likelihood function and makes the posterior density analytically intractable. In order to overcome this problem of posterior analysis, some approximation methods have been proposed in literature. In this paper we first review the main analytic approximations proposed to approximate the posterior density of ARMA models to be analytically tractable, which include Newbold, Zellner-Reynolds, and Broemeling-Shaarawy approximations. We then use the Kullback-Leibler divergence to study the relation between these three analytic approximations and to measure the distance between their derived approximate posteriors for ARMA models. In addition, we evaluate the impact of the approximate posteriors distance in Bayesian estimates of mean and precision of the model coefficients by generating a large number of Monte Carlo simulations from the approximate posteriors. Simulation study results show that the approximate posteriors of Newbold and Zellner-Reynolds are very close to each other, and their estimates have higher precision compared to those of Broemeling-Shaarawy approximation. Same results are obtained from the application to real-world time series datasets.