  Modeling nonstationary processes is of paramount importance to many
scientific disciplines including environmental science, ecology, and finance,
among others. Consequently, flexible methodology that provides accurate
estimation across a wide range of processes is a subject of ongoing interest.
We propose a novel approach to model-based time-frequency estimation using
time-varying autoregressive models. In this context, we take a fully Bayesian
approach and allow both the autoregressive coefficients and innovation variance
to vary over time. Importantly, our estimation method uses the lattice filter
and is cast within the partial autocorrelation domain. The marginal posterior
distributions are of standard form and, as a convenient by-product of our
estimation method, our approach avoids undesirable matrix inversions. As such,
estimation is extremely computationally efficient and stable. To illustrate the
effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a comprehensive simulation study that
compares our method with other competing methods and find that, in most cases,
our approach performs superior in terms of average squared error between the
estimated and true time-varying spectral density. Lastly, we demonstrate our
methodology through three modeling applications; namely, insect communication
signals, environmental data (wind components), and macroeconomic data (US gross
domestic product (GDP) and consumption).
