Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter: a concise review

The continued increase in availability of economic data in recent years and, more impor-tantly, the possibility to construct larger frequency time series, have fostered the use (and development) of statistical and econometric techniques to treat them more accurately. This paper presents an exposition of structural time series models by which a time series can be decomposed as the sum of a trend, seasonal and irregular components. In addition to a detailled analysis of univariate speci\u85cations we also address the SUTSE multivariate case and the issue of cointegration. Finally, the recursive estimation and smoothing by means of the Kalman \u85lter algorithm is described taking into account its di¤erent stages, from initialisation to parameters estimation