Factor and Idiosyncratic VAR-Ito Volatility Models for Heavy-Tailed High-Frequency Financial Data

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel It^{o} diffusion process for both factor and idiosyncratic volatilities whose eigenvalues follow the vector auto-regressive (VAR) model. We call it the factor and idiosyncratic VAR-It^{o} (FIVAR-It^o) model. The FIVAR-It^o model considers dynamics of the factor and idiosyncratic volatilities and involve many parameters. In addition, the empirical studies have shown that the financial returns often exhibit heavy tails. To address these two issues simultaneously, we propose a penalized optimization procedure with a truncation scheme for a parameter estimation. We apply the proposed parameter estimation procedure to predicting large volatility matrices and investigate its asymptotic properties. Using high-frequency trading data, the proposed method is applied to large volatility matrix prediction and minimum variance portfolio allocation.