Bayesian Estimation of the Spectral Density of a Time Series

This article describes a Bayesian approach to estimating the spectral density of a stationary time series. A nonparametric prior on the spectral density is described through Bernstein polynomials. Because the actual likelihood is very complicated, a pseudoposterior distribution is obtained by updating the prior using the Whittle likelihood. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling from this posterior distribution is described that is used for computing the posterior mean, variance, and other statistics. A consistency result is established for this pseudoposterior distribution that holds for a short-memory Gaussian time series and under some conditions on the prior. To prove this asymptotic result, a general consistency theorem of Schwartz is extended for a triangular array of independent, nonidentically distributed observations. This extension is also of independent interest. A simulation study is conducted to compare the proposed method with some existing methods. The method is illustrated with the well-studied sunspot dataset.