Fairly hum-drum days of articles on testing for unit roots in time series led to discovery of an extraordinary new forecasting approach – using the future to predict the present.

Since virtually the only empirical application of the new technique is predicting bubbles in Bitcoin values, I include some of the recent news about Bitcoins at the end of the post.

Noncausal Autoregressive Models

I think you have to describe the forecasting approach recently considered by Lanne and Saikkonen, as well as Hencic, Gouriéroux and others, as “exciting,” even “sexy” in a Saturday Night Live sort of way.

Here is a brief description from a 2015 article in the Econometrics of Risk called Noncausal Autoregressive Model in Application to Bitcoin/USD Exchange Rates

I’ve always been a little behind the curve on lag operators, but basically Ψ(L^-1) is a function of the standard lagged operators, while Φ(L) is a second function of offsets to future time periods.

To give an example, consider,

yt = k₁y_t-1+s₁y_t+1 + e_t

where subscripts t indicate time period.

In other words, the current value of the variable y is related to its immediately past value, and also to its future value, with an error term e being included.

This is what I mean by the future being used to predict the present.

Ordinarily in forecasting, one would consider such models rather fruitless. After all, you are trying to forecast y for period t+1, so how can you include this variable in the drivers for the forecasting setup?

But the surprising thing is that it is possible to estimate a relationship like this on historic data, and then take the estimated parameters and develop simulations which lead to predictions at the event horizon, of, say, the next period’s value of y.

This is explained in the paragraph following the one cited above –

In other words, because e_t in equation (1) can have infinite variance, it is definitely not normally distributed, or distributed according to a Gaussian probability distribution.

This is fascinating, since many financial time series are associated with nonGaussian error generating processes – distributions with fat tails that often are platykurtotic.

I recommend the Hencic and Gouriéroux article as a good read, as well as interesting analytics.

The authors proposed that a stationary time series is overlaid by explosive speculative periods, and that something can be abstracted in common from the structure of these speculative excesses.

Mt. Gox, of course, mentioned in this article, was raided in 2013 by Japanese authorities, after losses of more than $465 million from Bitcoin holders.

Now, two years later, the financial industry is showing increasing interest in the underlying Bitcoin technology and Bitcoin prices are on the rise once again.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I really, really like a forecast methodology based on recognition that data come from nonGaussian processes, and am intrigued by the fact that the ability to forecast with noncausal AR models depends on the error process being nonGaussian.