We consider a microstructure model for a financial asset, allowing for price discreteness and for a diffusive behavior at large sampling scale. This model, introduced by Delattre and Jacod, consists in the observation at the high frequency $n$, with round-off error $α_n$, of a diffusion on a finite interval. We give from this sample estimators for different forms of the integrated volatility of the asset. Our method is based on variational properties of the process associated with wavelet techniques. We prove that the accuracy of our estimation procedures is $α_n\vee n^{-1/2}$. Using compensated estimators, limit theorems are obtained.
In this paper, we are concerned with nonparametric inference on the volatility of volatility process in stochastic volatility models. We construct several estimators for its integrated version in a high-frequency setting, all based on increments of spot volatility estimators. Some of those are positive by construction, others are bias corrected in order to attain the optimal rate $n^{-1/4}$. Associated central limit theorems are proven which can be widely used in practice, as they are the key to essentially all tools in model validation for stochastic volatility models. As an illustration we g…
In this paper, we develop econometric tools to analyze the integrated volatility of the efficient price and the dynamic properties of microstructure noise in high-frequency data under general dependent noise. We first develop consistent estimators of the variance and autocovariances of noise using a variant of realized volatility. Next, we employ these estimators to adapt the pre-averaging method and derive a consistent estimator of the integrated volatility, which converges stably to a mixed Gaussian distribution at the optimal rate $n^{1/4}$. To refine the finite sample performance, we propo…
We propose new nonparametric estimators of the integrated volatility of an Itô semimartingale observed at discrete times on a fixed time interval with mesh of the observation grid shrinking to zero. The proposed estimators achieve the optimal rate and variance of estimating integrated volatility even in the presence of infinite variation jumps when the latter are stochastic integrals with respect to locally "stable" Lévy processes, that is, processes whose Lévy measure around zero behaves like that of a stable process. On a first step, we estimate locally volatility from the empirical characte…
The optimal rate of convergence of estimators of the integrated volatility, for a discontinuous Itô semimartingale sampled at regularly spaced times and over a fixed time interval, has been a long-standing problem, at least when the jumps are not summable. In this paper, we study this optimal rate, in the minimax sense and for appropriate "bounded" nonparametric classes of semimartingales. We show that, if the $r$th powers of the jumps are summable for some $r\in[0,2)$, the minimax rate is equal to $\min(\sqrt{n},(n\log n)^{(2-r)/2})$, where $n$ is the number of observations.
The problem of integrated volatility estimation for the solution X of a stochastic differential equation with L{é}vy-type jumps is considered under discrete high-frequency observations in both short and long time horizon. We provide an asymptotic expansion for the integrated volatility that gives us, in detail, the contribution deriving from the jump part. The knowledge of such a contribution allows us to build an unbiased version of the truncated quadratic variation, in which the bias is visibly reduced. In earlier results the condition $β$ > 1 2(2--$α$) on $β$ (that is such that (1/n) $β$ is…
High-frequency data observed on the prices of financial assets are commonly modeled by diffusion processes with micro-structure noise, and realized volatility-based methods are often used to estimate integrated volatility. For problems involving a large number of assets, the estimation objects we face are volatility matrices of large size. The existing volatility estimators work well for a small number of assets but perform poorly when the number of assets is very large. In fact, they are inconsistent when both the number, $p$, of the assets and the average sample size, $n$, of the price data …
We consider microstructure as an arbitrary contamination of the underlying latent securities price, through a Markov kernel $Q$. Special cases include additive error, rounding and combinations thereof. Our main result is that, subject to smoothness conditions, the two scales realized volatility is robust to the form of contamination $Q$. To push the limits of our result, we show what happens for some models that involve rounding (which is not, of course, smooth) and see in this situation how the robustness deteriorates with decreasing smoothness. Our conclusion is that under reasonable smoothn…
We study the non-parametric estimation of an unknown stationary density fV of an unobserved strictly stationary volatility process $(\bm V_t)_{t\geq 0}$ on $\IRp^2 := (0,\infty)^2$ based on discrete-time observations in a stochastic volatility model. We identify the underlying multiplicative measurement error model and build an estimator based on the estimation of the Mellin transform of the scaled, integrated volatility process and a spectral cut-off regularisation of the inverse of the Mellin transform. We prove that the proposed estimator leads to a consistent estimation strategy. A fully d…
We propose a new concept of modulated bipower variation for diffusion models with microstructure noise. We show that this method provides simple estimates for such important quantities as integrated volatility or integrated quarticity. Under mild conditions the consistency of modulated bipower variation is proven. Under further assumptions we prove stable convergence of our estimates with the optimal rate $n^{-{1}/{4}}$. Moreover, we construct estimates which are robust to finite activity jumps.
For a semimartingale with jumps, we propose a new estimation method for integrated volatility, i.e., the quadratic variation of the continuous martingale part, based on the global jump filter proposed by Inatsugu and Yoshida [8]. To decide whether each increment of the process has jumps, the global jump filter adopts the upper $α$-quantile of the absolute increments as the threshold. This jump filter is called global since it uses all the observations to classify one increment. We give a rate of convergence and prove asymptotic mixed normality of the global realized volatility and its variant …
With the availability of high frequency financial data, nonparametric estimation of volatility of an asset return process becomes feasible. A major problem is how to estimate the volatility consistently and efficiently, when the observed asset returns contain error or noise, for example, in the form of microstructure noise. The former (consistency) has been addressed heavily in the recent literature, however, the resulting estimator is not quite efficient. In Zhang, Mykland and Ait-Sahalia (2003), the best estimator converges to the true volatility only at the rate of n^{-1/6}. In this paper, …
In this article we consider the volatility inference in the presence of both market microstructure noise and endogenous time. Estimators of the integrated volatility in such a setting are proposed, and their asymptotic properties are studied. Our proposed estimator is compared with the existing popular volatility estimators via numerical studies. The results show that our estimator can have substantially better performance when time endogeneity exists.
We construct fractionally integrated continuous-time GARCH models, which capture the observed long range dependence of squared volatility in high-frequency data. Since the usual Molchan-Golosov and Mandelbrot-van-Ness fractional kernels lead to problems in the definition of the model, we resort to moderately long memory processes by choosing a fractional parameter $d\in(-0.5,0)$ and remove the singularities of the kernel to obtain non-pathological sample paths. The volatility of the new fractional COGARCH process has positive features like stationarity, and its covariance function shows an alg…
Time- and state-domain methods are two common approaches for nonparametric prediction. The former predominantly uses the data in the recent history while the latter mainly relies on historical information. The question of combining these two pieces of valuable information is an interesting challenge in statistics. We surmount this problem via dynamically integrating information from both the time and the state domains. The estimators from both domains are optimally combined based on a data driven weighting strategy, which provides a more efficient estimator of volatility. Asymptotic normality …
We consider discrete-time observations of a continuous martingale under measurement error. This serves as a fundamental model for high-frequency data in finance, where an efficient price process is observed under microstructure noise. It is shown that this nonparametric model is in Le Cam's sense asymptotically equivalent to a Gaussian shift experiment in terms of the square root of the volatility function $σ$ and a nonstandard noise level. As an application, new rate-optimal estimators of the volatility function and simple efficient estimators of the integrated volatility are constructed.
After a quick review of superpositions of OU (supOU) processes, integrated sup\-OU processes and the supOU stochastic volatility model we estimate these processes by using the generalized method of moments (GMM). We show that the GMM approach yields consistent estimators and that it works very well in practice. Moreover, we discuss the influence of long memory effects.
This article studies the finite sample behaviour of a number of estimators for the integrated power volatility process of a Brownian semistationary process in the non semi-martingale setting. We establish three consistent feasible estimators for the integrated volatility, two derived from parametric methods and one non-parametrically. We then use a simulation study to compare the convergence properties of the estimators to one another, and to a benchmark of an infeasible estimator. We further establish bounds for the asymptotic variance of the infeasible estimator and assess whether a central …
This paper discusses and analyzes a class of likelihood models which are based on two distributional innovations in financial models for stock returns. That is, the notion that the marginal distribution of aggregate returns of log-stock prices are well approximated by generalized hyperbolic distributions, and that volatility clustering can be handled by specifying the integrated volatility as a random process such as that proposed in a recent series of papers by Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (BNS). The BNS models produce likelihoods for aggregate returns which can be viewed as a subclass of l…
The basic model for high-frequency data in finance is considered, where an efficient price process is observed under microstructure noise. It is shown that this nonparametric model is in Le Cam's sense asymptotically equivalent to a Gaussian shift experiment in terms of the square root of the volatility function $σ$. As an application, simple rate-optimal estimators of the volatility and efficient estimators of the integrated volatility are constructed.
We consider the problem of testing the parametric form of the volatility for high frequency data. It is demonstrated that in the presence of microstructure noise commonly used tests do not keep the preassigned level and are inconsistent. The concept of preaveraging is used to construct new tests, which do not suffer from these drawbacks. These tests are based on a Kolmogorov-Smirnov or Cramer-von-Mises functional of an integrated stochastic process, for which weak convergence to a (conditional) Gaussian process is established. The finite sample properties of a bootstrap version of the test are…
We consider a multidimensional Ito semimartingale regularly sampled on [0,t] at high frequency $1/Δ_n$, with $Δ_n$ going to zero. The goal of this paper is to provide an estimator for the integral over [0,t] of a given function of the volatility matrix. To approximate the integral, we simply use a Riemann sum based on local estimators of the pointwise volatility. We show that although the accuracy of the pointwise estimation is at most $Δ_n^{1/4}$, this procedure reaches the parametric rate $Δ_n^{1/2}$, as it is usually the case in integrated functionals estimation. After a suitable bias corre…
We study the asymptotic normality of two feasible estimators of the integrated volatility of volatility based on the Fourier methodology, which does not require the pre-estimation of the spot volatility. We show that the bias-corrected estimator reaches the optimal rate $n^{1/4}$, while the estimator without bias-correction has a slower convergence rate and a smaller asymptotic variance. Additionally, we provide simulation results that support the theoretical asymptotic distribution of the rate-efficient estimator and show the accuracy of the latter in comparison with a rate-optimal estimator …
This paper considers the possibility that the daily average Particulate Matter (PM$_{10}$) concentration is a seasonal fractionally integrated process with time-dependent variance (volatility). In this context, one convenient extension is to consider the SARFIMA model (Reisen, et al, 2006a,b) with GARCH type innovations. The model is theoretically justified and its usefulness is corroborated with the application to PM$_{10}$ concentration in the city of Cariacica-ES (Brazil). The model adjusted was able to capture the dynamics in the series. The out-of-sample forecast intervals were improved b…
For a semi-martingale $X_t$, which forms a stochastic boundary, a rate-optimal estimator for its quadratic variation $\langle X, X \rangle_t$ is constructed based on observations in the vicinity of $X_t$. The problem is embedded in a Poisson point process framework, which reveals an interesting connection to the theory of Brownian excursion areas. We derive $n^{-1/3}$ as optimal convergence rate in a high-frequency framework with $n$ observations (in mean). We discuss a potential application for the estimation of the integrated squared volatility of an efficient price process $X_t$ from intra-…
This article studies nonparametric methods to estimate the co-integrated volatility for multi-dimensional Lévy processes with high frequency data. We construct a spectral estimator for the co-integrated volatility and prove minimax rates for an appropriate bounded nonparametric class of semimartingales. Given $ n $ observations of increments over intervals of length $1/n$, the rates of convergence are $1 / \sqrt{n} $ if $ r \leq 1 $ and $ (n\log n)^{(r-2)/2} $ if $ r>1 $, which are optimal in a minimax sense. We bound the co-jump index activity from below with the harmonic mean. Finally, we as…
We study the parameter estimation for parabolic, linear, second-order, stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) observing a mild solution on a discrete grid in time and space. A high-frequency regime is considered where the mesh of the grid in the time variable goes to zero. Focusing on volatility estimation, we provide an explicit and easy to implement method of moments estimator based on squared increments. The estimator is consistent and admits a central limit theorem. This is established moreover for the joint estimation of the integrated volatility and parameters in the different…
Recently Carr and Wu (2004, 2005) and also Huang and Wu (2004) show that most stochastic processes used in traditional option pricing models can be cast as special cases of time-changed Lévy processes. In particular these are models which can be tailored to exhibit correlated jumps in both the log price of assets and the instantaneous volatility. Naturally similar to a recent work of Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2001a, b), such models may be used in a likelihood based framework. These likelihoods are based on the unobserved integrated volatility, rather than the instantaneous volatility. Ja…
This article generalises the concept of realised covariation to Hilbert-space-valued stochastic processes. More precisely, based on high-frequency functional data, we construct an estimator of the trace-class operator-valued integrated volatility process arising in general mild solutions of Hilbert space-valued stochastic evolution equations in the sense of Da Prato and Zabczyk (2014). We prove a weak law of large numbers for this estimator, where the convergence is uniform on compacts in probability with respect to the Hilbert-Schmidt norm. In addition, we show that the conditions on the vola…
Volatility estimation based on high-frequency data is key to accurately measure and control the risk of financial assets. A Lévy process with infinite jump activity and microstructure noise is considered one of the simplest, yet accurate enough, models for financial data at high-frequency. Utilizing this model, we propose a "purposely misspecified" posterior of the volatility obtained by ignoring the jump-component of the process. The misspecified posterior is further corrected by a simple estimate of the location shift and re-scaling of the log likelihood. Our main result establishes a Bernst…
We consider noisy non-synchronous discrete observations of a continuous semimartingale with random volatility. Functional stable central limit theorems are established under high-frequency asymptotics in three setups: one-dimensional for the spectral estimator of integrated volatility, from two-dimensional asynchronous observations for a bivariate spectral covolatility estimator and multivariate for a local method of moments. The results demonstrate that local adaptivity and smoothing noise dilution in the Fourier domain facilitate substantial efficiency gains compared to previous approaches. …
Realized statistics based on high frequency returns have become very popular in financial economics. In recent years, different non-parametric estimators of the variation of a log-price process have appeared. These were developed by many authors and were motivated by the existence of complete records of price data. Among them are the realized quadratic (co-)variation which is perhaps the most well known example, providing a consistent estimator of the integrated (co-)volatility when the logarithmic price process is continuous. Limit results such as the weak law of large numbers or the central …
We consider the problem of estimating stochastic volatility for a class of second-order parabolic stochastic PDEs. Assuming that the solution is observed at a high temporal frequency, we use limit theorems for multipower variations and related functionals to construct consistent nonparametric estimators and asymptotic confidence bounds for the integrated volatility process. As a byproduct of our analysis, we also obtain feasible estimators for the regularity of the spatial covariance function of the noise.
In a series of recent papers Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard introduce an attractive class of continuous time stochastic volatility models for financial assets where the volatility processes are functions of positive Ornstein-Uhlenbeck(OU) processes. This models are known to be substantially more flexible than Gaussian based models. One current problem of this approach is the unavailability of a tractable exact analysis of likelihood based stochastic volatility models for the returns of log prices of stocks. With this point in mind, the likelihood models of Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard are vi…
