Bayesian Analysis of Intraday Stochastic Volatility Models of High-Frequency Stock Returns with Skew Heavy-Tailed Errors

Intraday high-frequency data of stock returns exhibit not only typical characteristics (e.g., volatility clustering and the leverage effect) but also a cyclical pattern of return volatility that is known as intraday seasonality. In this paper, we extend the stochastic volatility (SV) model for application with such intraday high-frequency data and develop an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithm for Bayesian inference of the proposed model. Our modeling strategy is two-fold. First, we model the intraday seasonality of return volatility as a Bernstein polynomial and estimate it along with the stochastic volatility simultaneously. Second, we incorporate skewness and excess kurtosis of stock returns into the SV model by assuming that the error term follows a family of generalized hyperbolic distributions, including variance-gamma and Student’s t distributions. To improve efficiency of MCMC implementation, we apply an ancillarity-sufficiency interweaving strategy (ASIS) and generalized Gibbs sampling. As a demonstration of our new method, we estimate intraday SV models with 1 min return data of a stock price index (TOPIX) and conduct model selection among various specifications with the widely applicable information criterion (WAIC). The result shows that the SV model with the skew variance-gamma error is the best among the candidates.