Frequently Asked Questions In Quantitative Finance

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Chapter 2: FAQs 167

difficulties in practice. These difficulties can be associ-
ated with



  • having insufficient data;

  • the (log)likelihood function being very ‘flat’ with
    respect to the parameters, so that the maximum is
    insensitive to the parameter values;

  • estimating the wrong model, including having too
    many parameters (the best model may be simpler
    than you think).


Family Members

Here aresomeof the other members of the GARCH
family. New ones are being added all the time, they are
breeding like rabbits. In these models the ‘shocks’ can
typically either have a normal distribution, a Student’s
t-distribution or a Generalized Error distribution, the
latter two having the fatter tails.


NGARCH


vn=(1−α−β)w 0 +βvn− 1 +α

(
Rn− 1 −γ


vn− 1

) 2
.

This is similar to GARCH(1, 1) but the parameterγ
permits correlation between the stock and volatility
processes.


AGARCH Absolute value GARCH. Similar to GARCH but
with the volatility (not the variance) being linear in the
absolute value of returns (instead of square of returns).


EGARCH Exponential GARCH. This models the logarithm
of the variance. The model also accommodates asym-
metry in that negative shocks can have a bigger impact
on volatility than positive shocks.

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