Hi I posted this problem yesterday but didn't get a reply so I try again today. I hope someone can help me with this. thank you very much for the help cheers Benedikt I would like to use arima () to find the best arima model for a time series. The default in arima apparently is to use conditional sum of squares to find the starting values and then use ML for the rest (as was described on the help page). Now, using the default may lead to error messages saying: "non-stationary ar part in CSS". When changeing the default from "CSS-ML" to "ML"-only the minimization works. As far as I understand, arima doesn't require stationarity, but apparently CSS does. Can anyone tell me what exactly the css method does? And why is CSS-ML the default in R? Out of efficiency reasons? Because ML and ML-CSS gives the exact same estimates when applied to the same data. I tried to find out on google but I couldnt' find anything usefull or understandable to me as a non-statistician. Here some data that causes the error message: X<-c(6.841067, 6.978443, 6.984755, 7.007225, 7.161198, 7.169790, 7.251534, 7.336429, 7.356600, 7.413271, 7.404165, 7.480869, 7.498686, 7.429809, 7.302747, 7.168251, 7.124798, 7.094881, 7.119132, 7.049250, 6.961049, 7.013442, 6.915243, 6.758036, 6.665078, 6.730523, 6.702005, 6.905522, 7.005191, 7.308986) model.examp<-arima(X,order=c(7,0,0),include.mean=T) # gives an error model.examp<-arima(X,order=c(7,0,0),include.mean=T,method="ML") # gives no error Any help on this would be most appreciated Many thanks fo the help best wishes Benedikt ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.