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In this paper, a novel approach to building a dynamic correlation network of highly volatile financial asset returns is presented. Our method avoids the spurious correlation problem when estimating the dynamic correlation matrix of financial asset returns by using a filtering approach. A multivariate volatility model, DCC–GARCH, is employed to filter the fat-tailed returns. The method is proven to be more reliable for detecting dynamic changes in the correlation matrix compared with the widely used method of calculating time-dependent correlation matrices over a fixed size moving window, which can have fundamental problems when applied to fat-tailed returns. We apply the method to selected Japanese stock returns to observe the dynamic network changes as a case study. The estimated time-dependent correlation matrices are then compared with those calculated by using the traditional method to highlight the advantages of the proposed method. Two types of indicators, namely the largest eigenvalue and cosine distance measures, are introduced to identify significant changes in the correlation matrix for an initial screening of remarkable stress events. A more detailed network-based analysis is then conducted by examining topological measures calculated from the network adjacency matrices. The higher density and lower heterogeneity of the correlation network during stress periods are clearly observed, while the correlation network of stock returns is shown to be robust with regard to time. The method discussed in this paper is not limited to stock returns; it can also be applied to build a dynamic correlation network of other financial and non-financial time series with high volatility.

In this study, we propose a novel approach to analyze a dynamic correlation network of highly volatile financial asset returns by using a network clustering algorithm to deal with high dimensionality issues. We analyze the dynamic correlation network of selected Japanese stock returns as an empirical study of the correlation dynamics at the market level by applying the proposed method. Two types of network clustering algorithms are employed for the dimensionality reduction. Firstly, several stock groups instead of the existing business sector classification are generated by the hierarchical recursive network clustering of filtered stock returns in order to overcome the high dimensionality problem due to the large number of stocks. The stock returns are then filtered in advance to control for volatility fluctuations that can distort the correlation between stocks. Thus, the correlation network of individual stock returns is transformed into a correlation network of group-based portfolio returns. Secondly, the reduced size of the correlation network is extended to a dynamic one by using a model-based correlation estimation method. A time series of adjacency matrices is created on a daily basis as a dynamic correlation network from the estimation results. Then, the correlation network is summarized into only three representative correlation networks by clustering along the time axis. Some intertemporal comparisons of the dynamic correlation network are conducted by examining the differences between the three sub-period networks. Our dynamic correlation network analysis framework is not limited to stock returns, but can be applied to many other financial and non-financial volatile time series data.

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