Higher-order potential forces observed in bubbles and crashes in financial markets

Basic peculiarities of market price fluctuations are known to be well described by a recently developed random walk model in a temporally deforming quadric potential force whose center is given by a moving average of past price traces [Physica A 370, pp91-97, 2006]. By analyzing high-frequency financial time series of exceptional events such as bubbles and crashes, we confirm the appearance of nonlinear potential force in the markets. We show statistical significance of its existence by applying the information criterion. This new time series analysis is expected to be applied widely for detecting a non-stationary symptom in random phenomena.