An important problem in time series analysis is the discrimination between non-stationarity and longrange dependence. Most of the literature considers the problem of testing specific parametric hypotheses of non-stationarity (such as a change in the mean) against long-range dependent stationary alternatives. In this paper we suggest a simple approach, which can be used to test the null-hypothesis of a general non-stationary short-memory against the alternative of a non-stationary long-memory process. The test procedure works in the spectral domain and uses a sequence of approximating tvFARIMA models to estimate the time varying long-range dependence parameter. We prove uniform consistency of this estimate and asymptotic normality of an averaged version. These results yield a simple test (based on the quantiles of the standard normal distribution), and it is demonstrated in a simulation study that -despite of its semi-parametric nature -the new test outperforms the currently available methods, which are constructed to discriminate between specific parametric hypotheses of non-stationarity short-and stationarity long-range dependence.

In this paper we consider the problem of measuring stationarity in locally stationary long-memory processes. We introduce an L2-distance between the spectral density of the locally stationary process and its best approximation under the assumption of stationarity. The distance is estimated by a numerical approximation of the integrated spectral periodogram and asymptotic normality of the resulting estimate is established. The results can be used to construct a simple test for the hypothesis of stationarity in locally stationary long-range dependent processes. We also propose a bootstrap procedure to improve the approximation of the nominal level and prove its consistency. Throughout the paper, we work with Riemann sums of a squared periodogram instead of integrals (as it is usually done in the literature) and as a by-product of independent interest it is demonstrated that the two approaches behave differently in the limit.

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