A new approach to nonparametric estimation of multivariate spectral density function using basis expansion

This paper develops a nonparametric method for estimating the spectral density of multivariate stationary time series using basis expansion. A likelihood-based approach is used to fit the model through the minimization of a penalized Whittle negative log-likelihood. Then, a Newton-type algorithm is developed for the computation. In this method, we smooth the Cholesky factors of the multivariate spectral density matrix in a way that the reconstructed estimate based on the smoothed Cholesky components is consistent and positive-definite. In a simulation study, we have illustrated and compared our proposed method with other competitive approaches. Finally, we apply our approach to two real-world problems, Electroencephalogram signals analysis, El Niño Cycle.