The Pitfalls of Continuous Heavy-Tailed Distributions in High-Frequency Data Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Holý, Vladimír
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Holý, Vladimír
author_facet Holý, Vladimír
contents We address the challenges of modeling high-frequency integer price changes in financial markets using continuous distributions, particularly the Student's t-distribution. We demonstrate that traditional GARCH models, which rely on continuous distributions, are ill-suited for high-frequency data due to the discreteness of price changes. We propose a modification to the maximum likelihood estimation procedure that accounts for the discrete nature of observations while still using continuous distributions. Our approach involves modeling the log-likelihood in terms of intervals corresponding to the rounding of continuous price changes to the nearest integer. The findings highlight the importance of adjusting for discreteness in volatility analysis and provide a framework for incroporating any continuous distribution for modeling high-frequency prices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_09785
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Pitfalls of Continuous Heavy-Tailed Distributions in High-Frequency Data Analysis
Holý, Vladimír
Statistical Finance
We address the challenges of modeling high-frequency integer price changes in financial markets using continuous distributions, particularly the Student's t-distribution. We demonstrate that traditional GARCH models, which rely on continuous distributions, are ill-suited for high-frequency data due to the discreteness of price changes. We propose a modification to the maximum likelihood estimation procedure that accounts for the discrete nature of observations while still using continuous distributions. Our approach involves modeling the log-likelihood in terms of intervals corresponding to the rounding of continuous price changes to the nearest integer. The findings highlight the importance of adjusting for discreteness in volatility analysis and provide a framework for incroporating any continuous distribution for modeling high-frequency prices.
title The Pitfalls of Continuous Heavy-Tailed Distributions in High-Frequency Data Analysis
topic Statistical Finance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09785