Statistical Methodology Commons^™

We propose a new variational Bayes estimator for high-dimensional copulas with discrete, or a combination of discrete and continuous, margins. The method is based on a variational approximation to a tractable augmented posterior, and is faster than previous likelihood-based approaches. We use it to estimate drawable vine copulas for univariate and multivariate Markov ordinal and mixed time series. These have dimension $rT$, where $T$ is the number of observations and $r$ is the number of series, and are difficult to estimate using previous methods. 

The vine pair-copulas are carefully selected to allow for heteroskedasticity, which is a feature of most ordinal …