October 7th, 2003, 2:59 pm
I guess that the key place to look for differences in the properties of MA and AR processes is in the autocorrelation function of the process in question. Taking first order ARs and MAs for simplicity, the former will give you an autocorrelation function that is exponentially decaying - the correlation between observations k time-periods apart is equal to the parameter in the AR(1) model to the power k. For an MA(1) process, all autocorrelations aside from the first are zero. What does this mean? It means that the effects of shocks to AR processes are felt over a relatively long period with the impact of the shock declining towards zero while the effects of a shock to an MA(1) processes are felt for one for one period (subsequent to that when the shock actually hits) only. Thus, if you like, the processes have very different "memory" characteristics. More generally, in the kth order case, the AR(k) process will still have an autocorrelation function that decays in some exponential fashion, while an MA(k) will have an autocorrelation function that's zero after lag k. Again, the memory characteristics of the two processes are very different. Hope this helps,richg.