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Department of Statistical Sciences

Introduction to fast Super-Paramagnetic Clustering

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

We map stock market interactions to spin models to recover their hierarchical structure using a simulated annealing based Super-Paramagnetic Clustering (SPC) algorithm. This is directly compared to a modified implementation of a maximum likelihood approach to fast-Super-Paramagnetic Clustering (f-SPC). The methods are first applied standard toy test-case problems, and then to a dataset of 447 stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) over 1249 days. The signal to noise ratio of stock market correlation matrices is briefly considered. Our result recover approximately clusters representative of standard economic sectors and mixed clusters whose dynamics shine light on the adaptive nature of financial markets and raise concerns relating to the effectiveness of industry based static financial market classification in the world of real-time data-analytics. A key result is that we show that the standard maximum likelihood methods are confirmed to converge to solutions within a Super-Paramagnetic (SP) phase. We use insights arising from this to discuss the implications of using a Maximum Entropy Principle (MEP) as opposed to the Maximum Likelihood Principle (MLP) as an optimization device for this class of problems.

Degree

thesis:*
Grantor
Department of Statistical Sciences
Year dc:date.issued
2019

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Yelibi, Lionel
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Gebbie, Timothy

Subjects

dc:subject × 5

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/11427/31332
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/31332

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
University of Cape Town
Base URL
open.uct.ac.za/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Yelibi, Lionel. Introduction to fast Super-Paramagnetic Clustering. Department of Statistical Sciences, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/31332