An Evaluation of ARFIMA (Autoregressive Fractional Integral Moving Average) Programs

Strong coupling between values at different times that exhibit properties of long range dependence, non-stationary, spiky signals cannot be processed by the conventional time series analysis. The autoregressive fractional integral moving average (ARFIMA) model, a fractional order signal processing technique, is the generalization of the conventional integer order models—autoregressive integral moving average (ARIMA) and autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model. Therefore, it has much wider applications since it could capture both short-range dependence and long range dependence. For now, several software programs have been developed to deal with ARFIMA processes. However, it is unfortunate to see that using different numerical tools for time series analysis usually gives quite different and sometimes radically different results. Users are often puzzled about which tool is suitable for a specific application. We performed a comprehensive survey and evaluation of available ARFIMA tools in the literature in the hope of benefiting researchers with different academic backgrounds. In this paper, four aspects of ARFIMA programs concerning simulation, fractional order difference filter, estimation and forecast are compared and evaluated, respectively, in various software platforms. Our informative comments can serve as useful selection guidelines.