Scalable Regularized Vector Multiplicative Error Models for Positive-valued Financial Time Series

The logarithmic multiplicative error model (log-vMEM) has been useful in modeling and forecasting multivariate positive-valued financial time series. The number of parameters grow rapidly with the dimension of the system and the lag order, making estimation computationally demanding in high-dimensional settings. This paper describes regularized estimation via hierarchical lag structures (Nicholson et al., 2020) for log-vMEM models with multivariate gamma error distribution of Tsionas (2004). The parameter estimation is performed using a blockwise coordinate descent algorithm with a Gauss-Seidel-style update scheme (Wright, 2015). This enables an efficient computation strategy compared to traditional penalized maximum likelihood approaches. The competing models are juxtaposed against each other by combining three hierarchical lag structures (componentwise, elementwise, own-other) and four penalties(group-lasso, adaptive group-lasso, group-mcp, and group-scad). Extensive simulation runs have been performed to test the parameter recovery for both the unpenalized and the penalized models. We apply the proposed methods to model the joint dynamics of robust intraday realized volatility measures for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) for the competing models. The numerical integration step of the log-likelihood is identified to be the principal computational bottleneck. We address this issue by using GPU-accelerated quadrature integration thus improving computational scalability of the proposed models.