Segmenting Observed Time Series Using Comovement and Complexity Measures

Abstract: Society depends on unbiased, efficient and replicable measurement tools to tell us more truthfully what is happening when our senses would otherwise fool us. A new approach is made to consistently detect the start and end of historic recessions as defined by the US Federal Reserve. To do this, three measures, correlation (Spearman and Pearson), Baur comovement and Kolmogorov complexity, are used to quantify market behaviour to detect recessions. To compare the effectiveness of each measure the normalized correct Area Under Curve (AUC) fraction is introduced. It is found that for all three measures, the performance is mostly dependent on the type of data and that financial market data does not perform as good as fundamental economical data to detect recessions. Furthermore, comovement is found to be the most efficient individual measure and also most efficient of all measures when compared against several measures merged together.