This paper provides a semiparametric model of estimating states of the volatility defined as the squared diffusion coefficient of a stochastic differential equation. Without assuming any functional form of the volatility function, we consider the volatility state as an unobservable state in a state space model and estimate it by filtering. By using the estimates, we can draw the information on what kind of functions the volatility has behind the observable state of the process. We also prove the consistency of the model in the sense that estimated states converges to the true ones as the observation time interval goes to zero. In addition to that, from a numerical point of views, we carry out numerical experiments by examples of stochastic differential equations with linear/nonlinear volatility functions in order to check whether or not the model can actually estimate the volatility and capture the information on its functional form.
One of the most important features of financial time series data is volatility. There are often structural changes in volatility over time, and an accurate estimation of the volatility of financial time series requires careful identification of change-points. A common approach to modeling the volatility of time series data is the well-known GARCH model. Although the problem of change-point estimation of volatility dynamics derived from the GARCH model has been considered in the literature, these approaches rely on parametric assumptions of the conditional error distribution, which are often vi…
This work develops change-point methods for statistics of high-frequency data. The main interest is in the volatility of an Itô semi-martingale, the latter being discretely observed over a fixed time horizon. We construct a minimax-optimal test to discriminate continuous paths from paths comprising volatility jumps. This is embedded into a more general theory to infer the smoothness of volatilities. In a high-frequency framework we prove weak convergence of the test statistic under the hypothesis to an extreme value distribution. Moreover, we develop methods to infer changes in the Hurst param…
We consider a parameter estimation problem for one dimensional stochastic heat equations, when data is sampled discretely in time or spatial component. We prove that, the real valued parameter next to the Laplacian (the drift), and the constant parameter in front of the noise (the volatility) can be consistently estimated under somewhat surprisingly minimal information. Namely, it is enough to observe the solution at a fixed time and on a discrete spatial grid, or at a fixed space point and at discrete time instances of a finite interval, assuming that the mesh-size goes to zero. The proposed …
Subordinate diffusions are constructed by time changing diffusion processes with an independent Lévy subordinator. This is a rich family of Markovian jump processes which exhibit a variety of jump behavior and have found many applications. This paper studies parametric inference of discretely observed ergodic subordinate diffusions. We solve the identifiability problem for these processes using spectral theory and propose a two-step estimation procedure based on estimating functions. In the first step, we use an estimating function that only involves diffusion parameters. In the second step, a…
Motivated by problems from statistical analysis for discretely sampled SPDEs, first we derive central limit theorems for higher order finite differences applied to stochastic process with arbitrary finitely regular paths. These results are proved by using the notion of $Δ$-power variations, introduced herein, along with the Hölder-Zygmund norms. Consequently, we prove a new central limit theorem for $Δ$-power variations of the iterated integrals of a fractional Brownian motion (fBm). These abstract results, besides being of independent interest, in the second part of the paper are applied to e…
Stochastic volatility modelling of financial processes has become increasingly popular. The proposed models usually contain a stationary volatility process. We will motivate and review several nonparametric methods for estimation of the density of the volatility process. Both models based on discretely sampled continuous time processes and discrete time models will be discussed. The key insight for the analysis is a transformation of the volatility density estimation problem to a deconvolution model for which standard methods exist. Three type of nonparametric density estimators are reviewed: …
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. …
We provide a simple explicit estimator for discretely observed Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard models, prove rigorously consistency and asymptotic normality based on the single assumption that all moments of the stationary distribution of the variance process are finite, and give explicit expressions for the asymptotic covariance matrix. We develop in detail the martingale estimating function approach for a bivariate model, that is not a diffusion, but admits jumps. We do not use ergodicity arguments. We assume that both, logarithmic returns and instantaneous variance are observed on a discrete…
Given the importance of continuous-time stochastic volatility models to describe the dynamics of interest rates, we propose a goodness-of-fit test for the parametric form of the drift and diffusion functions, based on a marked empirical process of the residuals. The test statistics are constructed using a continuous functional (Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramér-von Mises) over the empirical processes. In order to evaluate the proposed tests, we implement a simulation study, where a bootstrap method is considered for the calibration of the tests. As the estimation of diffusion models with stochasti…
We consider the moderate deviations behaviors for two (co-) volatility estima-tors: generalised bipower variation, Hayashi-Yoshida estimator. The results are obtained by using a new result about the moderate deviations principle for m-dependent random variables based on the Chen-Ledoux type condition. In the last decade there has been a considerable development of the asymptotic theory for processes observed at a high frequency. This was mainly motivated by financial applications , where the data, such as stock prices or currencies, are observed very frequently. As under the no-arbitrage assum…
We derive consistent and asymptotically normal estimators for the drift and volatility parameters of the stochastic heat equation driven by an additive space-only white noise when the solution is sampled discretely in the physical domain. We consider both the full space and the bounded domain. We establish the exact spatial regularity of the solution, which in turn, using power-variation arguments, allows building the desired estimators. We show that naive approximations of the derivatives appearing in the power-variation based estimators may create nontrivial biases, which we compute explicit…
We propose nonparametric estimators of the occupation measure and the occupation density of the diffusion coefficient (stochastic volatility) of a discretely observed Itô semimartingale on a fixed interval when the mesh of the observation grid shrinks to zero asymptotically. In a first step we estimate the volatility locally over blocks of shrinking length, and then in a second step we use these estimates to construct a sample analogue of the volatility occupation time and a kernel-based estimator of its density. We prove the consistency of our estimators and further derive bounds for their ra…
This paper deals with the problem of testing for dispersion parameter change in discretely observed diffusion processes when the observations are contaminated by outliers. To lessen the impact of outliers, we first calculate residuals using a robust estimate and then propose a trimmed-residual based CUSUM test. The proposed test is shown to converge weakly to a function of the Brownian bridge under the null hypothesis of no parameter change. We conduct simulations to evaluate performances of the proposed test in the presence of outliers. Numerical results confirm that the proposed test posses …
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…
In this paper we consider an ergodic diffusion process with jumps whose drift coefficient depends on $μ$ and volatility coefficient depends on $σ$, two unknown parameters. We suppose that the process is discretely observed at the instants (t n i)i=0,...,n with $Δ$n = sup i=0,...,n--1 (t n i+1 -- t n i) $\rightarrow$ 0. We introduce an estimator of $θ$ := ($μ$, $σ$), based on a contrast function, which is asymptotically gaussian without requiring any conditions on the rate at which $Δ$n $\rightarrow$ 0, assuming a finite jump activity. This extends earlier results where a condition on the step …
We define a generalized index of jump activity, propose estimators of that index for a discretely sampled process and derive the estimators' properties. These estimators are applicable despite the presence of Brownian volatility in the process, which makes it more challenging to infer the characteristics of the small, infinite activity jumps. When the method is applied to high frequency stock returns, we find evidence of infinitely active jumps in the data and estimate their index of activity.
We propose localized spectral estimators for the quadratic covariation and the spot covolatility of diffusion processes which are observed discretely with additive observation noise. The eligibility of this approach to lead to an appropriate estimation for time-varying volatilities stems from an asymptotic equivalence of the underlying statistical model to a white noise model with correlation and volatility processes being constant over small intervals. The asymptotic equivalence of the continuous-time and the discrete-time experiments are proved by a construction with linear interpolation in …
In this paper we discuss a closed-form approximation of the likelihood functions of an arbitrary diffusion process. The approximation is based on an exponential ansatz of the transition probability for a finite time step $Δt$, and a series expansion of the deviation of its logarithm from that of a Gaussian distribution. Through this procedure, dubbed {\em exponent expansion}, the transition probability is obtained as a power series in $Δt$. This becomes asymptotically exact if an increasing number of terms is included, and provides remarkably accurate results even when truncated to the first f…
This paper studies an approximation method for the log-likelihood function of a nonlinear diffusion process using the bridge of the diffusion. The main result (Theorem \refthm:approx) shows that this approximation converges uniformly to the unknown likelihood function and can therefore be used efficiently with any algorithm for sampling from the law of the bridge. We also introduce an expected maximum likelihood (EML) algorithm for inferring the parameters of discretely observed diffusion processes. The approach is applicable to a subclass of nonlinear SDEs with constant volatility and drift t…
In this work, we develop a novel principal component analysis (PCA) for semimartingales by introducing a suitable spectral analysis for the quadratic variation operator. Motivated by high-dimensional complex systems typically found in interest rate markets, we investigate correlation in high-dimensional high-frequency data generated by continuous semimartingales. In contrast to the traditional PCA methodology, the directions of large variations are not deterministic, but rather they are bounded variation adapted processes which maximize quadratic variation almost surely. This allows us to redu…
