Description
We consider the sets of moving-average and autoregressive processes and study their closures under the Mallows metric and the total variation convergence on finite dimensional distributions. These closures are unexpectedly large, containing non-ergodic processes which are Poisson sums of i.i.d. copies from a stationary process. The presence of these non-ergodic Poisson sum processes has immediate implications. In particular, identifiability of the hypothesis of linearity of a process is in question. A discussion of some of these issues for the set of moving-average processes has already been given without proof in Bickel and B\"{u}hlmann (1996). We establish here the precise mathematical arguments and present some additional extensions: results about the closure of autoregressive processes and natural sub-sets of moving-average and autoregressive processes which are closed.