Recurrence duration statistics and time-dependent intrinsic correlation analysis of trading volumes: A study of Chinese stock indices

The trading volume in stock markets is known as an important variable which reflects the liquidity of the financial markets and therefore is regarded to be greatly important for the measurement of market liquidity risk. In this work, a new concept called recurrence duration is introduced for study of daily trading volumes, which is inspired by idea of the volatility duration that was proposed and studied in our previous work. The recurrence duration is thought as the shortest passing time that the following days' trading volume takes to exceed or go below the current trading volume which is time-varying. Similar to the volatility duration distribution of the price returns, the power-law function could describe the empirical probability distribution of recurrence durations of trading volumes, and their tail distributions can be fitted by two stretched exponential functions. Further, the correlation relationships of trading volumes between Chinese stock indices as well as the correlations of recurrence durations are investigated. One approach employed is a recently proposed method, time-dependent intrinsic correlation (TDIC), which is based on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to decompose nonlinear and nonstationary signals into the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), the instantaneous periods of which are used then in determination of the sizes of sliding windows to compute the running correlation coefficients for the multiscale signals. The empirical results reveal rich patterns of correlations for both trading volumes and recurrence durations at different scales for different modes. Another approach is the widely-used DCCA cross-correlation coefficient, by which the level of cross-correlation is measured for both original series and IMF modes of the stock indices.