Heteroscedastic mixture transition distribution (HMTD) model

The paper further studies the heteroscedastic mixture transition distribution (HMTD) model introduced by Berchtold. Both the expectation and the standard deviation of each component are written as functions of the past of the process. The stationarity conditions are derived. An expectation conditional maximization (ECM) algorithm is used and shown to work well for estimation, the model selection problem is addressed, and the formulaes for computing the observed information matrix are derived. The shape changing feature of conditional distributions makes the model capable of modelling time series with asymmetric or multimodal distribution. The model is applied to several simulated and real datasets with satisfactory results.