Methods of Estimation Involving Discounting

Abstract

Summary In the estimation of the parameters in time series models arising in economic and business situations, it is often of value to introduce some method of discounting which produces updated estimators that give more weight to recent data than to that arising in the distant past. The simplest methods of introducing such discounting are to modify the traditional methods of estimation. Such modifications are discussed for the methods of moments, least squares and maximum likelihood. The final section discusses criteria upon which such techniques can be evaluated.