Scaling and Memory Effect in Volatility Return Interval of the Chinese Stock Market

We investigate the probability distribution of the volatility return intervals $tau$ for the Chinese stock market. We rescale both the probability distribution $P_{q}(tau)$ and the volatility return intervals $tau$ as $P_{q}(tau)=1/bar{tau} f(tau/bar{tau})$ to obtain a uniform scaling curve for different threshold value $q$. The scaling curve can be well fitted by the stretched exponential function $f(x) sim e^{-alpha x^{gamma}}$, which suggests memory exists in $tau$. To demonstrate the memory effect, we investigate the conditional probability distribution $P_{q} (tau|tau_{0})$, the mean conditional interval $<tau|tau_{0}>$ and the cumulative probability distribution of the cluster size of $tau$. The results show clear clustering effect. We further investigate the persistence probability distribution $P_{pm}(t)$ and find that $P_{-}(t)$ decays by a power law with the exponent far different from the value 0.5 for the random walk, which further confirms long memory exists in $tau$. The scaling and long memory effect of $tau$ for the Chinese stock market are similar to those obtained from the United States and the Japanese financial markets.