We introduce a new measure of activity of financial markets that provides a
direct access to their level of endogeneity. This measure quantifies how much
of price changes are due to endogenous feedback processes, as opposed to
exogenous news. For this, we calibrate the self-excited conditional Poisson
Hawkes model, which combines in a natural and parsimonious way exogenous
influences with self-excited dynamics, to the E-mini S&P 500 futures contracts
traded in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from 1998 to 2010. We find that the
level of endogeneity has increased significantly from 1998 to 2010, with only
70% in 1998 to less than 30% since 2007 of the price changes resulting from
some revealed exogenous information. Analogous to nuclear plant safety
concerned with avoiding "criticality", our measure provides a direct
quantification of the distance of the financial market to a critical state
defined precisely as the limit of diverging trading activity in absence of any
external driving.
Prediction markets show considerable promise for developing flexible
mechanisms for machine learning. Here, machine learning markets for
multivariate systems are defined, and a utility-based framework is established
for their analysis. This differs from the usual approach of defining static
betting functions. It is shown that such markets can implement model
combination methods used in machine learning, such as product of expert and
mixture of expert approaches as equilibrium pricing models, by varying agent
utility functions. They can also implement models composed of local potentials,
and message passing methods. Prediction markets also allow for more flexible
combinations, by combining multiple different utility functions. Conversely,
the market mechanisms implement inference in the relevant probabilistic models.
This means that market mechanism can be utilized for implementing parallelized
model building and inference for probabilistic modelling.
This paper deals with the disciplinary dimensions of a very new field called econphysics and shows that despite the fact that econophysics is regularly described as an interdisciplinary approach, it is in fact a multidisciplinary field. Beyond this observation, we note that recent developments suggests that econophysics could evolve into a more integrated field. We have therefore taken a prospective approach by analyzing how this field could become more transdisciplinary. We show that a common echeme is attainable and we investigate the possibilities of transdisciplinary econophysics.
To investigate the universal structure of interactions in financial dynamics,
we analyze the cross-correlation matrix C of price returns of the Chinese stock
market, in comparison with those of the American and Indian stock markets. As
an important emerging market, the Chinese market exhibits much stronger
correlations than the developed markets. In the Chinese market, the
interactions between the stocks in a same business sector are weak, while extra
interactions in unusu
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al sectors are detected. Using a variation of the
two-factor model, we simulate the interactions in financial markets.
We introduce a new method for detection of long-range cross-correlations and
multifractality - multifractal height cross-correlation analysis (MF-HXA) -
based on scaling of qth order covariances. MF-HXA is a bivariate generalization
of the height-height correlation analysis of Barabasi & Vicsek [Barabasi, A.L.,
Vicsek, T.: Multifractality of self-affine fractals, Physical Review A 44(4),
1991]. The method can be used to analyze long-range cross-correlations and
multifractality between two simultaneously recorded series. We illustrate a
power of the method on both simulated and real-world time series.
Different network models have been suggested for the topology underlying
complex interactions in natural systems. These models are aimed at replicating
specific statistical features encountered in real-world networks. However, it
is rarely considered to which degree the results obtained for one particular
network class can be extrapolated to real-world networks. We address this issue
by comparing different classical and more recently developed network models
with respect to their generalisation power, which we identify with large
structural variability and absence of constraints imposed by the construction
scheme. After having identified the most variable networks, we address the
issue of which constraints are common to all network classes and are thus
suitable candidates for being generic statistical laws of complex networks. In
fact, we find that generic, not model-related dependencies between different
network characteristics do exist. This allows, for instance, to infer global
features from local ones using regression models trained on networks with high
generalisation power. Our results confirm and extend previous findings
regarding the synchronisation properties of neural networks. Our method seems
especially relevant for large networks, which are difficult to map completely,
like the neural networks in the brain. The structure of such large networks
cannot be fully sampled with the present technology. Our approach provides a
method to estimate global properties of under-sampled networks with good
approximation. Finally, we demonstrate on three different data sets (C.
elegans' neuronal network, R. prowazekii's metabolic network, and a network of
synonyms extracted from Roget's Thesaurus) that real-world networks have
statistical relations compatible with those obtained using regression models.
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We show how random matrix theory can be applied to develop new algorithms to
extract dynamic factors from macroeconomic time series. In particular, we
consider a limit where the number of random variables N and the number of
consecutive time measurements T are large but the ratio N / T is fixed. In this
regime the underlying random matrices are asymptotically equivalent to Free
Random Variables (FRV).Application of these methods for macroeconomic
indicators for Poland economy is also presented.
class="descriptor">Abstract:</spa
af8
n> For fat tailed distributions (i.e. those that decay slower than an
exponential), large deviations not only become relatively likely, but the way
in which they are realized changes dramatically: A finite fraction of the whole
sample deviation is concentrated on a single variable: large deviations are not
the accumulation of many small deviations, but rather they are dominated to a
single large fluctuation. The regime of large deviations is separated from the
regime of typical fluctuations by a phase transition where the symmetry between
the points in the sample is {\em spontaneously broken}. This phenomenon has
been discussed in the context of mass transport models in physics, where it
takes the form of a condensation phase transition. Yet, the phenomenon is way
more general. For example, in risk management of large portfolios, it suggests
that one should expect losses to concentrate on a single asset: when extremely
bad things happen, it is likely that there is a single factor on which bad luck
concentrates. Along similar lines, one should expect that bubbles in financial
markets do not gradually deflate, but rather burst abruptly and that in the
most rainy day of a year, precipitation concentrate on a given spot.
Analogously, when applied to biological evolution, we're lead to infer that, if
fitness changes for individual mutations have a broad distribution, those large
deviations that lead to better fit species are not likely to result from the
accumulation of small positive mutations. Rather they are likely to arise from
large rare jumps.
Human dynamical social networks encode information and are highly adaptive.
To characterize the information encoded in the fast dynamics of social
interactions, here we introduce the en
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tropy of dynamical social networks. By
analysing a large dataset of phone-call interactions we show evidence that the
dynamical social network has an entropy that depends on the time of the day in
a typical week-day. Moreover we show evidence for adaptability of human social
behavior showing data on duration of phone-call interactions that significantly
deviates from the statistics of duration of face-to-face interactions. This
adaptability of behavior corresponds to a different information content of the
dynamics of social human interactions. We quantify this information by the use
of the entropy of dynamical networks on realistic models of social
interactions.
With the daily and minutely data of the German DAX and Chinese indices, we
investigate how the return-volatility correlation originates in financial
dynamics. Based on a retarded volatility model, we may eliminate or generate
the return-volatility correlation of the time series, while other
characteri
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stics, such as the probability distribution of returns and long-range
time-correlation of volatilities etc., remain essentially unchanged. This
suggests that the leverage effect or anti-leverage effect in financial markets
arises from a kind of feedback return-volatility interactions, rather than the
long-range time-correlation of volatilities and asymmetric probability
distribution of returns. Further, we show that large volatilities dominate the
return-volatility correlation in financial dynamics.