ROBUST INFERENCE FOR THE MEAN IN THE PRESENCE OF SERIAL CORRELATION AND HEAVY-TAILED DISTRIBUTIONS

Abstract

The problem of statistical inference for the mean of a time series with possibly heavy tails is considered. We first show that the self-normalized sample mean has a well-defined asymptotic distribution. Subsampling theory is then used to develop asymptotically correct confidence intervals for the mean without knowledge (or explicit estimation) either of the dependence characteristics, or of the tail index. Using a symmetrization technique, we also construct a distribution estimator that combines robustness and accuracy: it is higher-order accurate in the regular case, while remaining consistent in the heavy tailed case. Some finite-sample simulations confirm the practicality of the proposed methods.