Improving predictability of time series using maximum entropy methods

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We discuss how maximum entropy methods may be applied to the reconstruction of Markov processes underlying empirical time series and compare this approach to usual frequency sampling. It is shown that, at least in low dimension, there exists a subset of the space of stochastic matrices for which the MaxEnt method is more efficient than sampling, in the sense that shorter historical samples have to be considered to reach the same accuracy. Considering short samples is of particular interest when modelling smoothly non-stationary processes, for then it provides, under some conditions, a powerful forecasting tool. The method is illustrated for a discretized empirical series of exchange rates.