Adaptive lasso in sparse vector autoregressive models

This paper considers variable selection in the sparse vector autoregressive (sVAR) model where sparsity comes from setting small coefficients to exact zeros. In the estimation perspective, Davis et al. (2015) showed that the lasso type of regularization method is successful because it provides a simultaneous variable selection and parameter estimation even for time series data. However, their simulations study reports that the regular lasso overestimates the number of non-zero coefficients, hence its finite sample performance needs improvements. In this article, we show that the adaptive lasso significantly improves the performance where the adaptive lasso finds the sparsity patterns superior to the regular lasso. Some tuning parameter selections in the adaptive lasso are also discussed from the simulations study.