From 1/f noise to multifractal cascades in heartbeat dynamics

We explore the degree to which concepts developed in statistical physics can be usefully applied to physiological signals. We illustrate the problems related to physiologic signal analysis with representative examples of human heartbeat dynamics under healthy and pathologic conditions. We first review recent progress based on two analysis methods, power spectrum and detrended fluctuation analysis, used to quantify long-range power-law correlations in noisy heartbeat fluctuations. The finding of power-law correlations indicates presence of scale-invariant, fractal structures in the human heartbeat. These fractal structures are represented by self-affine cascades of beat-to-beat fluctuations revealed by wavelet decomposition at different time scales. We then describe very recent work that quantifies multifractal features in these cascades, and the discovery that the multifractal structure of healthy dynamics is lost with congestive heart failure. The analytic tools we discuss may be used on a wide range of physiologic signals. (c) 2001 American Institute of Physics.     

Analysis of the efficiency of the Shanghai stock market: A volatility perspective

By applying the rolling window method, we investigate the efficiency of the Shanghai stock market through the dynamic changes of local Hurst exponents based on multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. We decompose the realized volatility into continuous sample paths and jump components and analyze their long-range correlations of decomposing components. Our results reveal that the efficiency of the Shanghai stock market improved greatly based on the time-varying Hurst exponents.     

基于小波leaders的海杂波时变奇异谱分布分析

海杂波的奇异谱分析不仅能从理论上揭示海洋表面的动力学机理,同时也是对海探测雷达的关键技术之一.本文提出基于小波leaders的海杂波时变奇异谱分析方法,将时间信息引入海杂波的奇异谱分析之中,从而实现动态的解析描述海杂波随时间变化的奇异谱特性.在理论上,通过信号自身加窗,将时间信息引入传统的奇异谱(或称多重分形谱),实现了对海杂波时变奇异谱分布分析;在算法上,充分利用了小波leaders技术对于多种奇异性的提取能力(包括chirp奇异性和cusp奇异性),通过对时变奇异性指数和时变尺度函数的Legendre变换,实现对海杂波时变奇异谱分布的计算;在应用部分,采用经典的多重分形模型——随机小波序列(RWC)以及三级海态条件下连续波多普勒体制雷达海杂波进行仿真分析,实验结果表明:1)基于小波leaders的奇异谱分布能跟踪海杂波的时变尺度特性,有效展示其时变奇异性谱分布;2)算法具有较好的负矩特性和统计收敛性.该方法能为复杂非线性系统及随机多重分形信号分析提供参考.     

Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis of the Chinese stock index futures market

Based on the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) and multifractal spectrum analysis, this paper empirically studies the multifractal properties of the Chinese stock index futures market. Using a total of 2942 ten-minute closing prices, we find that the Chinese stock index futures returns exhibit long-range correlations and multifractality, making the single-scale index insufficient to describe the futures price fluctuations. Further, by comparing the original time series with the transformed time series through shuffling procedure and phase randomization procedure, we show the existence of two different sources of the multifractality for the Chinese stock index futures market. Our results suggest that the multifractality is mainly due to long-range correlations, although the fat-tailed probability distributions also contribute to such multifractal behaviour.     

Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis of Interevent Time Series in a Modified OFC Model

We use multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis(MF-DFA) method to investigate the multifractal behavior of the interevent time series in a modified Olami-Feder-Christensen(OFC) earthquake model on assortative scale-free networks.We determine generalized Hurst exponent and singularity spectrum and find that these fluctuations have multifractal nature.Comparing the MF-DFA results for the original interevent time series with those for shuffled and surrogate series,we conclude that the origin of multifractality is due to both the broadness of probability density function and long-range correlation.     

Multifractal properties of Chinese stock market in Shanghai

In this article, we apply three methods of multifractal analysis, partition function method, singular spectrum method and multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis method, to analyze the closing index fluctuations of Shanghai stock market during the past seven years. We have found that Shanghai stock market has weak multifractal features and there are long-range power-law correlations between index series. The shapes of singular spectrums do not change with time scales and their strengths weaken when the scales shorten. But when the orders of partition function increase, the strengths of multifractal increase, the singular spectrums become rougher and the general Hurst exponents decrease. These results provide solid and important values for further study on the dynamic mechanism of stock market price fluctuation.     

Multifractal detrending moving average analysis on the US Dollar exchange rates

In this paper, we investigate the multifractal behavior of the US dollar (USD) exchange rates. The results from the multifractal detrending moving average algorithm show that twelve exchange rate series were multifractal. The major source of multifractality are long-range correlations of small and large fluctuations. Fat-tail distributions have important effects on the multifractality of USD/AUR, USD/EUR and CNY/USD exchange rates. We also find evidence that extreme events play an important role in the contributions to multifractality for the USD/EUR exchange rate.     

Multifractal Analysis of Human Heartbeat in Sleep

We study the dynamical properties of heart rate variability （HRV） in sleep by analysing the scaling behaviour with the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis method. It is well known that heart rate is regulated by the interaction of two branches of the autonomic nervous system： the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. By investigating the multifractal properties of light, deep, rapid-eye-movement （REM） sleep and wake stages, we firstly find an increasing multifractal behaviour during REM sleep which may be caused by augmented sympathetic activities relative to non-REM sleep. In addition, the investigation of long-range correlations of HRV in sleep with second order detrended fluctuation analysis presents irregular phenomena. These findings may be helpful to understand the underlying regulating mechanism of heart rate by autonomic nervous system during wake-sleep transitions.     

Asymmetric multifractal scaling behavior in the Chinese stock market: Based on asymmetric MF-DFA

We utilized asymmetric multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis in this study to examine the asymmetric multifractal scaling behavior of Chinese stock markets with uptrends or downtrends. Results show that the multifractality degree of Chinese stock markets with uptrends is stronger than that of Chinese stock markets with downtrends. Correlation asymmetries are more evident in large fluctuations than in small fluctuations. By discussing the source of asymmetric multifractality, we find that multifractality is related to long-range correlations when the market is going up, whereas it is related to fat-tailed distribution when the market is going down. The main source of asymmetric scaling behavior in the Shanghai stock market are long-range correlations, whereas that in the Shenzhen stock market is fat-tailed distribution. An analysis of the time-varying feature of scaling asymmetries shows that the evolution trends of these scaling asymmetries are similar in the two Chinese stock markets. Major financial and economical events may enhance scaling asymmetries.     

Application of statistical physics to heartbeat diagnosis.

We present several recent studies based on statistical physics concepts that can be used as diagnostic tools for heart failure. We describe the scaling exponent characterizing the long-range correlations in heartbeat time series as well as the multifractal features recently discovered in heartbeat rhythm. It is found that both features, the long-range correlations and the multifractility, are weaker in cases of heart failure.     

Forecasting volatility in Shanghai and Shenzhen markets based on multifractal analysis

This paper analyzes the multifractality in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets using multifractal spectrum analysis and multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. We find that the main source of multifractality is long-range correlations of large and small fluctuations. Then, we introduce a multifractal volatility measure (MV) and find that by taking MV as daily conditional volatility, the simulated series displayed similar “stylized facts” to the original daily return series. By capturing the dynamics of MV using the ARFIMA model, we find that the out-of-sample forecasting performance of the ARFIMA-MV model is better than some GARCH-class models and the ARFIMA-RV model under some criteria of loss function.     

Research on the relationship between the multifractality and long memory of realized volatility in the SSECI

We examine the multifractal properties of the realized volatility (RV) and realized bipower variation (RBV) series in the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index (SSECI) by using the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) method. We find that there exist distinct multifractal characteristics in the volatility series. The contributions of two different types of source of multifractality, namely, fat-tailed probability distributions and nonlinear temporal correlations, are studied. By using the unit root test, we also find the strength of the multifractality of the volatility time series is insensitive to the sampling frequency but that the long memory of these series is sensitive.     

Nucleotide composition effects on the long-range correlations in human genes

We use the wavelet transform to investigate the fractal scaling properties of coding and noncoding human DNA sequences. We find that the strength of the long-range correlations observed in the introns increases with the guanine-cytosine (GC) content, while coding sequences show no such correlations at any GC content. However, we demonstrate that long-range correlations can be detected when the coding sequences are undersampled by retaining the third base of each codon only. This strongly suggests that the observed correlations are not likely to be due to insertion-deletion mechanisms. We comment about the origin of these correlations in terms of putative dynamical processes that could produce the isochore structure of the human genome. Received: 18 August 1997 / Accepted: 29 October 1997     

Multifractal properties of the Indian financial market

We investigate the multifractal properties of the logarithmic returns of the Indian financial indices (BSE & NSE) by applying the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. The results are compared with that of the US S&P 500 index. Numerically we find that qth-order generalized Hurst exponents h(q) and τ(q) change with the moments q. The nonlinear dependence of these scaling exponents and the singularity spectrum f(α) show that the returns possess multifractality. By comparing the MF-DFA results of the original series to those for the shuffled series, we find that the multifractality is due to the contributions of long-range correlations as well as the broad probability density function. The financial markets studied here are compared with the Binomial Multifractal Model (BMFM) and have a smaller multifractal strength than the BMFM.     

Multiresolution analysis of fluctuations in non-stationary time series through discrete wavelets

We illustrate the efficacy of a discrete wavelet based approach to characterize fluctuations in non-stationary time series. The present approach complements the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) method and is quite accurate for small size data sets. As compared to polynomial fits in the MF-DFA, a single Daubechies wavelet is used here for detrending purposes. The natural, built-in variable window size in wavelet transforms makes this procedure well suited for non-stationary data. We illustrate the working of this method through the analysis of binomial multifractal model. For this model, our results compare well with those calculated analytically and obtained numerically through MF-DFA. To show the efficacy of this approach for finite data sets, we also do the above comparison for Gaussian white noise time series of different sizes. In addition, we analyze time series of three experimental data sets of tokamak plasma and also spin density fluctuations in 2D Ising model.     

Three-dimensional wavelet-based multifractal method: the need for revisiting the multifractal description of turbulence dissipation data

We generalize the wavelet transform modulus maxima (WTMM) method to multifractal analysis of 3D random fields. This method is calibrated on synthetic 3D monofractal fractional Brownian fields and on 3D multifractal singular cascade measures as well as their random function counterpart obtained by fractional integration. Then we apply the 3D WTMM method to the dissipation field issued from 3D isotropic turbulence simulations. We comment on the need to revisit previous box-counting analyses which have failed to estimate correctly the corresponding multifractal spectra because of their intrinsic inability to master nonconservative singular cascade measures.     

Long-range dependence and multifractality in the term structure of LIBOR interest rates

In this paper we present evidence of long-range dependence in LIBOR interest rates. We study a data set from 2000 to 2005, for six different currencies and various maturities. Empirical results suggest that the degree of long-range dependence decreases with maturity, with the exception of interest rates on Japanese Yen and on Indonesian Rupiah. Furthermore, interest rates have a multifractal nature and the degree of multifractality is much stronger for Indonesia (emerging market). These findings suggest that interest rates derivatives should take these features into account. Furthermore, fixed income risk and portfolio management should incorporate long-range dependence in the modeling of interest rates.     

Difference in nature of correlation between NASDAQ and BSE indices

We apply a recently developed wavelet based approach to characterize the correlation and scaling properties of non-stationary financial time series. This approach is local in nature and it makes use of wavelets from the Daubechies family for detrending purpose. The built-in variable windows in wavelet transform makes this procedure well suited for the non-stationary data. We analyze daily price of NASDAQ composite index for a period of 20 years, and BSE sensex index, over a period of 15 years. It is found that the long-range correlation, as well as fractal behavior for both the stock index values differ from each other significantly. Strong non-statistical long-range correlation is observed in BSE index, whose removal revealed a Gaussian random noise character for the corresponding fluctuation. The NASDAQ index, on the other hand, showed a multifractal behavior with long-range statistical correlation.