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Financial mathematics is one of the most natural applications for the statistical analysis of time series. Financial time series reflect simultaneous activity of a large number of different economic agents. Consequently, one expects that methods of statistical physics and the theory of random processes can be applied to them.

In this paper, we provide a statistical analysis of time series of the FOREX currency market. Of particular interest is the comparison of the time series behavior depending on the way time is measured: physical time versus trading time measured in the number of elementary price changes (ticks). The experimentally observed statistics of the time series under consideration (euro–dollar for the first half of 2007 and for 2009 and British pound – dollar for 2007) radically differs depending on the choice of the method of time measurement. When measuring time in ticks, the distribution of price increments can be well described by the normal distribution already on a scale of the order of ten ticks. At the same time, when price increments are measured in real physical time, the distribution of increments continues to differ radically from the normal up to scales of the order of minutes and even hours.

To explain this phenomenon, we investigate the statistical properties of elementary increments in price and time. In particular, we show that the distribution of time between ticks for all three time series has a long (1-2 orders of magnitude) power-law tails with exponential cutoff at large times. We obtained approximate expressions for the distributions of waiting times for all three cases. Other statistical characteristics of the time series (the distribution of elementary price changes, pair correlation functions for price increments and for waiting times) demonstrate fairly simple behavior. Thus, it is the anomalously wide distribution of the waiting times that plays the most important role in the deviation of the distribution of increments from the normal. As a result, we discuss the possibility of applying a continuous time random walk (CTRW) model to describe the FOREX time series.

A method is proposed for analyzing the tremor of the earth’s surface, measured by means of space geodesy, in order to highlight the prognostic effects of seismicity activation. The method is illustrated by the example of a joint analysis of a set of synchronous time series of daily vertical displacements of the earth’s surface on the Japanese Islands for the time interval 2009–2023. The analysis is based on dividing the source data (1047 time series) into blocks (clusters of stations) and sequentially applying the principal component method. The station network is divided into clusters using the K-means method from the maximum pseudo-F-statistics criterion, and for Japan the optimal number of clusters was chosen to be 15. The Huang decomposition method into a sequence of independent empirical oscillation modes (EMD — Empirical Mode Decomposition) is applied to the time series of principal components from station blocks. To provide the stability of estimates of the waveforms of the EMD decomposition, averaging of 1000 independent additive realizations of white noise of limited amplitude was performed. Using the Cholesky decomposition of the covariance matrix of the waveforms of the first three EMD components in a sliding time window, indicators of abnormal tremor behavior were determined. By calculating the correlation function between the average indicators of anomalous behavior and the released seismic energy in the vicinity of the Japanese Islands, it was established that bursts in the measure of anomalous tremor behavior precede emissions of seismic energy. The purpose of the article is to clarify common hypotheses that movements of the earth’s crust recorded by space geodesy may contain predictive information. That displacements recorded by geodetic methods respond to the effects of earthquakes is widely known and has been demonstrated many times. But isolating geodetic effects that predict seismic events is much more challenging. In our paper, we propose one method for detecting predictive effects in space geodesy data.