Eur. Phys. J. B (2012) 85: 175
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-20697-x

Regular Article

Exponential smoothing weighted correlations

¹ Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physical Sciences, The Australian National University, 0200 Canberra, ACT, Australia
² Department of Mathematics, King’s College London, The Strand, WC2R 2 LS London, UK
³ School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7 NH Kent, UK

^a e-mail: francesco.pozzi@anu.edu.au

Received: 25 August 2011
Received in final form: 8 March 2012
Published online: 4 June 2012

Abstract

In many practical applications, correlation matrices might be affected by the “curse of dimensionality” and by an excessive sensitiveness to outliers and remote observations. These shortcomings can cause problems of statistical robustness especially accentuated when a system of dynamic correlations over a running window is concerned. These drawbacks can be partially mitigated by assigning a structure of weights to observational events. In this paper, we discuss Pearson’s ρ and Kendall’s τ correlation matrices, weighted with an exponential smoothing, computed on moving windows using a data-set of daily returns for 300 NYSE highly capitalized companies in the period between 2001 and 2003. Criteria for jointly determining optimal weights together with the optimal length of the running window are proposed. We find that the exponential smoothing can provide more robust and reliable dynamic measures and we discuss that a careful choice of the parameters can reduce the autocorrelation of dynamic correlations whilst keeping significance and robustness of the measure. Weighted correlations are found to be smoother and recovering faster from market turbulence than their unweighted counterparts, helping also to discriminate more effectively genuine from spurious correlations.