  The vector autoregressive (VAR) model has been widely used for modeling
temporal dependence in a multivariate time series. For large (and even
moderate) dimensions, the number of AR coefficients can be prohibitively large,
resulting in noisy estimates, unstable predictions and difficult-to-interpret
temporal dependence. To overcome such drawbacks, we propose a 2-stage approach
for fitting sparse VAR (sVAR) models in which many of the AR coefficients are
zero. The first stage selects non-zero AR coefficients based on an estimate of
the partial spectral coherence (PSC) together with the use of BIC. The PSC is
useful for quantifying the conditional relationship between marginal series in
a multivariate process. A refinement second stage is then applied to further
reduce the number of parameters. The performance of this 2-stage approach is
illustrated with simulation results. The 2-stage approach is also applied to
two real data examples: the first is the Google Flu Trends data and the second
is a time series of concentration levels of air pollutants.
