An autoregressive ordered probit model with application to high-frequency financial data

This article introduces a model that can be considered as an autoregressive extension of the ordered probit model. For parameter estimation we first develop a standard Gibbs sampler which however exhibits bad convergence properties. Using a special transformation group on the sample space we develop a grouped move multigrid Monte Carlo (GM-MGMC) Gibbs sampler and illustrate its fundamental superiority in convergence compared to the standard sampler. To be able to compare the autoregressive ordered probit (AOP) model to other models we further provide an estimation procedure for the marginal likelihood which enables us to compute Bayes factors. We apply the new model to absolute price changes of the IBM stock traded on December 4, 2000, at the New York Stock Exchange. To detect whether the data contain an autoregressive structure we then fit the AOP model as well as the common ordered probit (OP) model to the data. By estimating the corresponding Bayes factor we show that the AOP model fits the data decisively better than the common OP model.