on an infinite number of parameters, although in practice they usually decay rapidly. The autoregressive model is an alternative that may have only a few coefficients if the corresponding moving average has many. These two models can be combined into an autoregressive-moving average (ARMA) model, or an autoregressive-integrated-moving average (ARIMA) model if non-stationarity is involved. See and references there; in addition this paper gives an extension of the Wold Theorem that allows more generality for the moving average (not necessarily stable, causal, or minimum delay) accompanied by a sharper characterization of the innovation (identically and independently distributed, not just uncorrelated). This extension allows the possibility of models that are more faithful to physical or astrophysical processes, and in particular can sense ″the arrow of time.″ References Wold, H. (1954) A Study in the Analysis of Stationary Time Series, Second revised edition, with an Appendix on "Recent Developments in Time Series Analysis" by Peter Whittle. Almqvist and Wiksell Book Co., Uppsala. Theorems in statistics Time series