Improving time series estimation and prediction via transfer learning

There are many time series in the literature with high dimension yet limited sample sizes, such as macroeconomic variables, and it is almost impossible to obtain efficient estimation and accurate prediction by using the corresponding datasets themselves. This paper fills the gap by introducing a novel representation-based transfer learning framework for vector autoregressive models, and information from related source datasets with rich observations can be leveraged to enhance estimation efficiency through representation learning. A two-stage regularized estimation procedure is proposed with well established non-asymptotic properties, and algorithms with alternating updates are suggested to search for the estimates. Our transfer learning framework can handle time series with varying sample sizes and asynchronous starting and/or ending time points, thereby offering remarkable flexibility in integrating information from diverse datasets. Simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the finite-sample performance of the proposed methodology, and its usefulness is demonstrated by an empirical analysis on 20 macroeconomic variables from Japan and another nine countries.