Identification of Time Series Models From Segments—Application to Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Images

Three important parametric models for describing the correlation functions and spectra of stationary stochastic processes are the autoregressive (AR), moving average (MA), and autoregressive-moving average (ARMA) models. Quite recently, the MATLAB toolbox “ARMASA” has been made publicly available. This toolbox provides state-of-the-art algorithms to perform automatic identification and selection between the models based on the estimated prediction error. ARMASA works on a single segment of data, whereas in some applications, the data are available as multiple segments. We could process each segment independently and average the estimated autocorrelation functions or spectra afterward. Better performance, however, can be expected when all segments are processed simultaneously, for two reasons. Initially, the bias in the estimated model parameters depends on the number of observations in a segment. Averaging models from segments does not reduce this bias, in contrast to identification from all the data at once. In either case, the variance of the estimated model parameters will decrease. By considering all the data at once this variance reduction can be considered in the order selection stage, decreasing the selection bias. In this paper, we extend the parameter estimation algorithms of the ARMASA toolbox to the case of multiple segments. AR parameter estimation from segments has been considered before, but not for the MA and ARMA models. In addition, in the AR case, model order selection can be done easily when the segments are independent. But, in the application we are primarily interested in, the segments are formed by lines of scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) images, which can be correlated with each other. Because the correlation among data segments influences the effective number of independent observations available it becomes necessary to estimate that number. This is not an easy problem in general. For observations from a stochastic process with an isotropic 2-D autocorrelation function we can, however, formulate an accurate estimator in terms of the line autocorrelation function. This situation arises, for example, in STEM images of amorphous specimens. From the AR model identification for segments, the extension to the MA and ARMA models is rather straightforward because MA and ARMA algorithms are based on Durbin's methods, whose first step is the estimation of a long AR model. We compare the segment-based algorithms to conventional ARMASA with simulations of stationary stochastic processes. An illustrative example involving simulated STEM images shows large potential benefits.