Flexible nonlinear inference and change-point testing of high-dimensional spectral density matrices

This paper studies a flexible approach to analyze high-dimensional nonlinear time series of unconstrained dimension based on linear statistics calculated from spectral average statistics of bilinear forms and nonlinear transformations of lag-window (i.e. band-regularized) spectral density matrix estimators. That class of statistics includes, among others, smoothed periodograms, nonlinear statistics such as coherency, long-run-variance estimators and contrast statistics related to factorial effects as special cases. Especially, we introduce the class of nonlinear spectral averages of the spectral density matrix. Having in mind big data settings, we study a sampling design which includes a sparse sampling scheme. Gaussian approximations with optimal rate are derived for nonlinear time series of growing dimension for these frequency domain statistics and the underlying lag-window (cross-) spectral estimator under non-stationarity. For change-testing (self-standardized) CUSUM statistics are examined. Further, a specific wild bootstrap procedure is proposed to estimate critical values. Simulation studies and an application to SP500 financial returns are provided in a supplement to this paper.