Rank and factor loadings estimation in time series tensor factor model by pre-averaging

The idiosyncratic components of a tensor time series factor model can exhibit serial correlations, (e.g., finance or economic data), ruling out many state-of-the-art methods that assume white/independent idiosyncratic components. While the traditional higher order orthogonal iteration (HOOI) is proved to be convergent to a set of factor loading matrices, the closeness of them to the true underlying factor loading matrices are in general not established, or only under i.i.d. Gaussian noises. Under the presence of serial and cross-correlations in the idiosyncratic components and time series variables with only bounded fourth-order moments, for tensor time series data with tensor order two or above, we propose a pre-averaging procedure that can be considered a random projection method. The estimated directions corresponding to the strongest factors are then used for projecting the data for a potentially improved re-estimation of the factor loading spaces themselves, with theoretical guarantees and rate of convergence spelt out when not all factors are pervasive. We also propose a new rank estimation method, which utilizes correlation information from the projected data. Extensive simulations are performed and compared to other state-of-the-art or traditional alternatives. A set of tensor-valued NYC taxi data is also analyzed.