New Evidence of Discrete Scale Invariance in the Energy Dissipation of Three-Dimensional Turbulence: Correlation Approach and Direct Spectral Detection

We extend the analysis of [Zhou and Sornette, Physica D 165, 94-125, 2002] showing statistically significant log-periodic corrections to scaling in the moments of the energy dissipation rate in experiments at high Reynolds number ($\approx 2500$) of three-dimensional fully developed turbulence. First, we develop a simple variant of the canonical averaging method using a rephasing scheme between different samples based on pairwise correlations that confirms Zhou and Sornette's previous results. The second analysis uses a simpler local spectral approach and then performs averages over many local spectra. This yields stronger evidence of the existence of underlying log-periodic undulations, with the detection of more than 20 harmonics of a fundamental logarithmic frequency $f = 1.434 \pm 0.007$ corresponding to the preferred scaling ratio $\gamma = 2.008 \pm 0.006$.Comment: 9 RevTex4 papes including 8 eps figure

Gibrat's law for cities: uniformly most powerful unbiased test of the Pareto against the lognormal

We address the general problem of testing a power law distribution versus a log-normal distribution in statistical data. This general problem is illustrated on the distribution of the 2000 US census of city sizes. We provide definitive results to close the debate between Eeckhout (2004, 2009) and Levy (2009) on the validity of Zipf's law, which is the special Pareto law with tail exponent 1, to describe the tail of the distribution of U.S. city sizes. Because the origin of the disagreement between Eeckhout and Levy stems from the limited power of their tests, we perform the {\em uniformly most powerful unbiased test} for the null hypothesis of the Pareto distribution against the lognormal. The $p$-value and Hill's estimator as a function of city size lower threshold confirm indubitably that the size distribution of the 1000 largest cities or so, which include more than half of the total U.S. population, is Pareto, but we rule out that the tail exponent, estimated to be $1.4 \pm 0.1$, is equal to 1. For larger ranks, the $p$-value becomes very small and Hill's estimator decays systematically with decreasing ranks, qualifying the lognormal distribution as the better model for the set of smaller cities. These two results reconcile the opposite views of Eeckhout (2004, 2009) and Levy (2009). We explain how Gibrat's law of proportional growth underpins both the Pareto and lognormal distributions and stress the key ingredient at the origin of their difference in standard stochastic growth models of cities \cite{Gabaix99,Eeckhout2004}.Comment: 7 pages + 2 figure

Empirical Distributions of Stock Returns : Between the Stretched Exponential and the Power Law?

International audienceA large consensus now seems to take for granted that the distributions of empirical returns of financial time series are regularly varying, with a tail exponent b close to 3. We develop a battery of new non-parametric and parametric tests to characterize the distributions of empirical returns of moderately large financial time series, with application to 100 years of daily returns of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to 1 year of 5-min returns of the Nasdaq Composite index and to 17 years of 1-min returns of the Standard & Poor's 500. We propose a parametric representation of the tail of the distributions of returns encompassing both a regularly varying distribution in one limit of the parameters and rapidly varying distributions of the class of the stretched-exponential (SE) and the log-Weibull or Stretched Log-Exponential (SLE) distributions in other limits. Using the method of nested hypothesis testing (Wilks' theorem), we conclude that both the SE distributions and Pareto distributions provide reliable descriptions of the data but are hardly distinguishable for sufficiently high thresholds. Based on the discovery that the SE distribution tends to the Pareto distribution in a certain limit, we demonstrate that Wilks' test of nested hypothesis still works for the non-exactly nested comparison between the SE and Pareto distributions. The SE distribution is found to be significantly better over the whole quantile range but becomes unnecessary beyond the 95% quantiles compared with the Pareto law. Similar conclusions hold for the log-Weibull model with respect to the Pareto distribution, with a noticeable exception concerning the very-high-frequency data. Summing up all the evidence provided by our tests, it seems that the tails ultimately decay slower than any SE but probably faster than power laws with reasonable exponents. Thus, from a practical viewpoint, the log-Weibull model, which provides a smooth interpolation between SE and PD, can be considered as an appropriate approximation of the sample distributions.<br/

On the Power of Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) and Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) Estimators for Empirical Distributions of Stock Returns

International audienceUsing synthetic tests performed on time series with time dependence in the volatility with both Pareto and Stretched-Exponential distributions, it is shown that for samples of moderate sizes the standard generalized extreme value (GEV) estimator is quite inefficient due to the possibly slow convergence toward the asymptotic theoretical distribution and the existence of biases in the presence of dependence between data. Thus, it cannot distinguish reliably between rapidly and regularly varying classes of distributions. The Generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) estimator works better, but still lacks power in the presence of strong dependence. Applied to 100 years of daily returns of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and over one years of five-minutes returns of the Nasdaq Composite index, the GEV and GDP estimators are found insufficient to prove that the distributions of empirical returns of financial time series are regularly varying, because the rapidly varying exponential or stretched exponential distributions are equally acceptable.<br/

Empirical Distributions of Stock Returns : Between the Stretched Exponential and the Power Law?

International audienceA large consensus now seems to take for granted that the distributions of empirical returns of financial time series are regularly varying, with a tail exponent b close to 3. We develop a battery of new non-parametric and parametric tests to characterize the distributions of empirical returns of moderately large financial time series, with application to 100 years of daily returns of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to 1 year of 5-min returns of the Nasdaq Composite index and to 17 years of 1-min returns of the Standard & Poor's 500. We propose a parametric representation of the tail of the distributions of returns encompassing both a regularly varying distribution in one limit of the parameters and rapidly varying distributions of the class of the stretched-exponential (SE) and the log-Weibull or Stretched Log-Exponential (SLE) distributions in other limits. Using the method of nested hypothesis testing (Wilks' theorem), we conclude that both the SE distributions and Pareto distributions provide reliable descriptions of the data but are hardly distinguishable for sufficiently high thresholds. Based on the discovery that the SE distribution tends to the Pareto distribution in a certain limit, we demonstrate that Wilks' test of nested hypothesis still works for the non-exactly nested comparison between the SE and Pareto distributions. The SE distribution is found to be significantly better over the whole quantile range but becomes unnecessary beyond the 95% quantiles compared with the Pareto law. Similar conclusions hold for the log-Weibull model with respect to the Pareto distribution, with a noticeable exception concerning the very-high-frequency data. Summing up all the evidence provided by our tests, it seems that the tails ultimately decay slower than any SE but probably faster than power laws with reasonable exponents. Thus, from a practical viewpoint, the log-Weibull model, which provides a smooth interpolation between SE and PD, can be considered as an appropriate approximation of the sample distributions.<br/