Factor multivariate stochastic volatility models of high dimension

Abstract: Building upon the pertinence of the factor decomposition to break the curse of dimensionality inherent to multivariate volatility processes, we develop a factor model-based multivariate stochastic volatility (fMSV) framework that relies on two viewpoints: sparse approximate factor model and sparse factor loading matrix. We propose a two-stage estimation procedure for the fMSV model: the first stage obtains the estimators of the factor model, and the second stage estimates the MSV part using the estimated common factor variables. We derive the asymptotic properties of the estimators. Simulated experiments are performed to assess the forecasting performances of the covariance matrices. The empirical analysis based on vectors of asset returns illustrates that the forecasting performances of the fMSV models outperforms competing conditional covariance models.