Online Outlier Detection in Financial Time Series

Abstract: In this Master’s thesis, different models for outlier detection in financial time series are examined. The financial time series are price series such as index prices or asset prices. Outliers are, in this thesis, defined as extreme and false points, but this definition is also investigated and revised. Two different time series models are examined: an autoregressive (AR) and a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) time series model, as well as one test statistic method based on the GARCH model. Additionally, a nonparametric model is examined, which utilizes kernel density estimation in order to detect outliers. The models are evaluated by how well they detect outliers and how often they misclassify inliers as well as the run time of the models. It is found that all the models performs approximately equally good, on the data sets used in thesis and the simulations done, in terms of how well the methods find outliers, apart from the test static method which performs worse than the others. Furthermore it is found that definition of an outlier is very crucial to how well a model detects the outliers. For the application of this thesis, the run time is an important aspect, and with this in mind an autoregressive model with a Student’s t-noise distribution is found to be the best one, both with respect to how well it detects outliers, misclassify inliers and run time of the model.