Linear identification of ARMA processes

A new method for estimating the parameters of an ARMA process is presented. The method consists of three linear least-squares estimations. In the first an autoregressive model is fitted to the observation sequence, yielding an estimate of the values of the driving white noise sequence. Linear least squares is then used to fit an ARMA model to the observation and estimated white noise sequences. This model is used to filter the observation and estimated white noise sequences. Finally an ARMA model is fitted to the filtered sequences. It is shown that the resultant estimator is ‘p-consistent’ (the asymptotic bias tends to zero as the degree p of the autoregressive model tends to infinity) and is ‘p-efficient’ (the asymptotic efficiency approaches the theoretical maximum as p tends to infinity).