Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2015 / iii / Paper 37 / 3 / a / Solution

For a centered weakly stationary process with $\gamma (0)>0$, the autocorrelation function isFor $h\ge 2$, let $P$ be orthogonal projection in L2 space onto the linear span of $X_{t-1},\dots ,X_{t-h+1}$. The lag-$h$ partial autocorrelation function is the correlation coefficient of $X_t-P{X}_t$ and $X_{t-h}-P{X}_{t-h}$. It removes the linear contribution of the intervening observations. At lag one it is just $\rho (1)$. For nonsingular prediction covariance matrices, it is equivalently the last coefficient $a_{hh}$ in the order-$h$ linear predictor of $X_t$ from $X_{t-1},\dots ,X_{t-h}$. Equal residual variances, by stationarity, identify that coefficient with the residual correlation. If a residual has zero variance, this correlation is undefined; the nondegeneracy condition matters.