Solved – How to calculate the standard deviation on a sample set with irregular time periods

I have a sample set of values that were taken over a period of time. However, the delta time between each sample is different.

Do I need to account for the different time deltas in the std-dev?

Is std-dev even appropriate for this kind of data?


More info…

The data are temperature samples.
The time range is from 1 hour to multiple days.

Yes, you do need to account for the irregularity of the time series because volatility scales with time. Depending upon the distribution and independence assumptions, sometimes a "square root of time" rule can be appropriate.

Is this data sampled irregularly intraday or across a longer time period? What kind of data is it?

For dealing with high-frequency financial data, you can apply a realized volatility measure, which is available in R in the realized package.

Similar Posts:

Rate this post

Leave a Comment