A light-tailed conditionally heteroscedastic model with applications to river flows

A conditionally heteroscedastic model, different from the more commonly used autoregressive moving average-generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (ARMA-GARCH) processes, is established and analysed here. The time-dependent variance of innovations passing through an ARMA filter is conditioned on the lagged values of the generated process, rather than on the lagged innovations, and is defined to be asymptotically proportional to those past values. Designed this way, the model incorporates certain feedback from the modelled process, the innovation is no longer of GARCH type, and all moments of the modelled process are finite provided the same is true for the generating noise. The article gives the condition of stationarity, and proves consistency and asymptotic normality of the Gaussian quasi-maximum likelihood estimator of the variance parameters, even though the estimated parameters of the linear filter contain an error. Copyright 2007 The Authors Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.