Mattias Villani
Abstract
A complete procedure for calculating the joint predictive distribution
of future observations based on the cointegrated vector autoregression
is presented. The large degree of uncertainty in the choice of cointegration
vectors is incorporated into the analysis via the prior distribution. This
prior has the effect of weighing the predictive distributions based on
the models with different cointegration vectors into an overall predictive
distribution. The ideas of Litterman are adapted for the prior on the short
run dynamics of the process with a resulting prior which only depends on
a few hyperparameters and is therefore easily specified. A straight forward
numerical evaluation of the predictive distribution based on Gibbs sampling
is proposed. The prediction procedure is applied to a seven variable system
with a focus on forecasting the Swedish inflation.
Keywords: Bayesian, Cointegration, Inflation forecasting, Model averaging,
Predictive density.