Random Fractals and the Stock Market

Surrogates of the Stock Market

Comparison of IFS Driven by Cartoons and Data

This is differences of daily closings for the Frankfurt DAX, from 6 Jan, 1986, to 31 Dec, 1997. Updating the dat a dcade or so might show some interesting behavior.
The middle bin boundary B2 is taken to be the mean of the differences, and B1 and B3 are taken 1.5 standard deviations below and above the mean.
A natural, and possibly important, problem is to find the cartoon that most closely matches the data set.
For convenience, we shall restrict our attention to symmetric cartoons, cartoons whose generators have turning points (a,b) and (1-a,1-b).
The chart shows an example of an IFS driven by the differences of the same number of data points as the DAX data, with the middle bin boundary B2 is taken to be the mean of the differences, and B1 and B3 are taken 1.5 standard deviations below and above the mean, for 49 choices of generator.
See how well you can match the data to a cartoon. Click on each picture for an enlargement, in a new window, along with a picture of the generator.
Recall these are single instances and so some details are doubtless influenced by the particular random number sequence used in creating the cartoon.
x=0.1 x=0.15 x=0.2 x=0.25 x=0.3 x=0.35 x=0.4
y=0.9
y=0.85
y=0.8
y=0.75
y=0.7
y=0.65
y=0.6
Visual comparison is a first step, but it is not the last step in matching cartoons to data. More analytical methods are under investigation.

Return to Cartoon Driven IFS.