This paper offers a new approach for estimating and forecasting the volatility of financial time series. No assumption is made about the parametric form of the processes. On the contrary, we only suppose that the volatility can be approximated by a constant over some interval. In such a framework, the main problem consists of filtering this interval of time homogeneity; then the estimate of the volatility can be simply obtained by local averaging.
We construct a locally adaptive volatility estimate (LAVE) which can perform this task and investigate it both from the theoretical point of view and through Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, the LAVE procedure is applied to a data set of nine exchange rates and a comparison with a standard GARCH model is also provided. Both models appear to be capable of explaining many of the features of the data; nevertheless, the new approach seems to be superior to the GARCH method as far as the out-of-sample results are concerned.
Spatial heteroskedasticity refers to stochastically changing variances and covariances in space. Such features have been observed in, for example, air pollution and vegetation data. We study how volatility modulated moving averages can model this by developing theory, simulation and statistical inference methods. For illustration, we also apply our procedure to sea surface temperature anomaly data from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
We study the estimation of the parametric components of single and multiple index volatility models. Using the first- and second-order Stein's identities, we develop methods that are applicable for the estimation of the variance index in the high-dimensional setting requiring finite moment condition, which allows for heavy-tailed data. Our approach complements the existing literature in the low-dimensional setting, while relaxing the conditions on estimation, and provides a novel approach in the high-dimensional setting. We prove that the statistical rate of convergence of our variance index e…
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University（纽约大学柯朗数学科学研究所）；Department of Mathematics, Stanford University（斯坦福大学数学系）；Department of Chemistry, Stanford University（斯坦福大学化学系）
In February 2018, the VIX index has seen its largest ever increase and has lead to significant losses for some major volatility related products. Despite many efforts, the precise underlying reasons are yet to be discovered. We study the role of linear causality in the VIX index and its derivatives during January and February 2018. Due to the shortcomings of statistical inferences for stochastic volatility models, the dynamics of the volatility expectation index VIX remain controversial. Leveraging intraday data, we discover novel empirical results describing their interaction. We find bidirec…
Quasi-Maximum Likelihood (QML) procedures are theoretically appealing and widely used for statistical inference. While there are extensive references on QML estimation in batch settings, it has attracted little attention in streaming settings until recently. An investigation of the convergence properties of the QML procedure in a general conditionally heteroscedastic time series model is conducted, and the classical batch optimization routines extended to the framework of streaming and large-scale problems. An adaptive recursive estimation routine for GARCH models named AdaVol is presented. Th…
Identifying the instances of jumps in a discrete-time-series sample of a jump diffusion model is a challenging task. We have developed a novel statistical technique for jump detection and volatility estimation in a return time series data using a threshold method. The consistency of the volatility estimator has been obtained. Since we have derived the threshold and the volatility estimator simultaneously by solving an implicit equation, we have obtained unprecedented accuracy across a wide range of parameter values. Using this method, the increments attributed to jumps have been removed from a…
We introduce a statistical test for simultaneous jumps in the price of a financial asset and its volatility process. The proposed test is based on high-frequency data and is robust to market microstructure frictions. For the test, local estimators of volatility jumps at price jump arrival times are designed using a nonparametric spectral estimator of the spot volatility process. A simulation study and an empirical example with NASDAQ order book data demonstrate the practicability of the proposed methods and highlight the important role played by price volatility co-jumps.
Statistical inference for stochastic processes based on high-frequency observations has been an active research area for more than a decade. One of the most well-known and widely studied problems is that of estimation of the quadratic variation of the continuous component of an Itô semimartingale with jumps. Several rate- and variance-efficient estimators have been proposed in the literature when the jump component is of bounded variation. However, to date, very few methods can deal with jumps of unbounded variation. By developing new high-order expansions of the truncated moments of a Lévy pr…
We statistically analyse a multivariate HJM diffusion model with stochastic volatility. The volatility process of the first factor is left totally unspecified while the volatility of the second factor is the product of an unknown process and an exponential function of time to maturity. This exponential term includes some real parameter measuring the rate of increase of the second factor as time goes to maturity. From historical data, we efficiently estimate the time to maturity parameter in the sense of constructing an estimator that achieves an optimal information bound in a semiparametric se…
Rough volatility models are continuous time stochastic volatility models where the volatility process is driven by a fractional Brownian motion with the Hurst parameter smaller than half, and have attracted much attention since a seminal paper titled "Volatility is rough" was posted on SSRN in 2014 showing that the log realized volatility time series of major stock indices have the same scaling property as such a rough fractional Brownian motion has. We however find by simulations that the impressive approach tends to suggest the same roughness irrespectively whether the volatility is actually…
We consider a problem of estimation for the telegrapher's process on the line, say X(t), driven by a Poisson process with non constant rate. It turns out that the finite-dimensional law of the process X(t) is a solution to the telegraph equation with non constant coefficients. We give the explicit law P(theta) of the process X(t) for a parametric class of intensity functions for the Poisson process. We propose an estimator for the parameter theta of P(theta) and we discuss its properties as a first attempt to apply statistics to these models.
A one dimensional diffusion process $X=\{X_t, 0\leq t \leq T\}$, with drift $b(x)$ and diffusion coefficient $σ(θ, x)=\sqrtθ σ(x)$ known up to $θ>0$, is supposed to switch volatility regime at some point $t^*\in (0,T)$. On the basis of discrete time observations from $X$, the problem is the one of estimating the instant of change in the volatility structure $t^*$ as well as the two values of $θ$, say $θ_1$ and $θ_2$, before and after the change point. It is assumed that the sampling occurs at regularly spaced times intervals of length $Δ_n$ with $nΔ_n=T$. To work out our statistical problem we…
