| This thesis is concerned with various aspects of stationary and nonstationary time series analysis. In the nonstationary case, we study estimation of the Wold-Cramér evolutionary spectrum, which is a time-dependent analogue of the spectrum of a stationary process. Existing estimators of the Wold-Cramér evolutionary spectrum suffer from several problems, including bias in boundary regions of the time-frequency plane, poor frequency resolution, and an inability to handle the presence of purely harmonic frequencies. We propose techniques to handle all three of these problems.;We also propose an estimator of the Wold-Cramér evolutionary spectrum, valid for uniformly modulated processes (UMPs). This estimator mitigates the second problem, by exploiting the structure of UMPs to improve the frequency resolution of the BCMTFSE. We apply this estimator to a simulated UMP with known Wold-Cramér evolutionary spectrum.;To deal with the third problem, one can detect and remove purely harmonic frequencies before applying the BCMTFSE. Doing so requires a consideration of the aliasing problem. We propose a frequency-domain technique to detect and unalias aliased frequencies in bivariate time series, based on the observation that aliasing manifests as nonlinearity in the phase of the complex coherency between a stationary process and a time-delayed version of itself. To illustrate this “unaliasing” technique, we apply it to simulated data and a real-world example of solar noon flux data.;We propose a new estimator of the Wold-Cramér evolutionary spectrum (the BCMTFSE) which mitigates the first problem. Our estimator is based on an extrapolation of the Wold-Cramér evolutionary spectrum in time, using an estimate of its time derivative. We apply our estimator to a set of simulated nonstationary processes with known Wold-Cramér evolutionary spectra to demonstrate its performance. |
