  In multivariate time series, the estimation of the covariance matrix of the
observation innovations plays an important role in forecasting as it enables
the computation of the standardized forecast error vectors as well as it
enables the computation of confidence bounds of the forecasts. We develop an
on-line, non-iterative Bayesian algorithm for estimation and forecasting. It is
empirically found that, for a range of simulated time series, the proposed
covariance estimator has good performance converging to the true values of the
unknown observation covariance matrix. Over a simulated time series, the new
method approximates the correct estimates, produced by a non-sequential Monte
Carlo simulation procedure, which is used here as the gold standard. The
special, but important, vector autoregressive (VAR) and time-varying VAR models
are illustrated by considering London metal exchange data consisting of spot
prices of aluminium, copper, lead and zinc.
