Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2014 iii Paper 36 2 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Interpret stationarity in the usual second-order time-series sense and assume nondegenerate noise, . For a two-sided autoregressive equation, the missing existence condition isIt is important to separate this from causality. If , the unique stationary solution is . If , there is still a stationary solution, but it is anticausal:Both expansions converge in L2 because their coefficients are square summable. Substitution verifies the equation. Their means are zero and their covariance functions depend only on lag. Uniqueness follows by iterating the equation backward in the first case and forward in the second: the remainders or tend to zero in L2 for any stationary finite-variance solution. This is the stationary versus causal solution of a two-sided AR(1) equation.
For , iteration givesThe variance of the right side is . The variance of the left side is at most by stationarity and Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. These are incompatible as . Thus no weakly stationary finite-variance solution exists at those unit roots.
If the intended claim includes a causal innovation representation, its condition is instead , as in the next part. The stated white noise equation alone does not say that is orthogonal to the past of . If zero innovation variance is allowed, the unit-root exclusion has degenerate exceptions, such as random constant solutions when ; the nondegenerate convention is necessary for the asserted nonexistence.