A prediction perspective on the Wiener-Hopf equations for discrete time series

The Wiener-Hopf equations are a Toeplitz system of linear equations that have several applications in time series. These include the update and prediction step of the stationary Kalman filter equations and the prediction of bivariate time series. The Wiener-Hopf technique is the classical tool for solving the equations, and is based on a comparison of coefficients in a Fourier series expansion. The purpose of this note is to revisit the (discrete) Wiener-Hopf equations and obtain an alternative expression for the solution that is more in the spirit of time series analysis. Specifically, we propose a solution to the Wiener-Hopf equations that combines linear prediction with deconvolution. The solution of the Wiener-Hopf equations requires one to obtain the spectral factorization of the underlying spectral density function. For general spectral density functions this is infeasible. Therefore, it is usually assumed that the spectral density is rational, which allows one to obtain a computationally tractable solution. This leads to an approximation error when the underlying spectral density is not a rational function. We use the proposed solution together with Baxter's inequality to derive an error bound for the rational spectral density approximation.