SPHARMA approximations for stationary functional time series on the sphere

In this paper, we focus on isotropic and stationary sphere-cross-time random fields. We first introduce the class of spherical functional autoregressive-moving average processes (SPHARMA), which extend in a natural way the spherical functional autoregressions (SPHAR) recently studied in Caponera and Marinucci (Ann Stat 49(1):346-369, 2021) and Caponera et al. (Stoch Process Appl 137:167-199, 2021); more importantly, we then show that SPHAR and SPHARMA processes of sufficiently large order can be exploited to approximate every isotropic and stationary sphere-cross-time random field, thus generalizing to this infinite-dimensional framework some classical results on real-valued stationary processes. Further characterizations in terms of functional spectral representation theorems and Wold-like decompositions are also established.