Hurst exponents for short time series

A concept called balanced estimator of diffusion entropy is proposed to detect quantitatively scalings in short time series. The effectiveness is verified by detecting successfully scaling properties for a large number of artificial fractional Brownian motions. Calculations show that this method can give reliable scalings for short time series with length ~10(2). It is also used to detect scalings in the Shanghai Stock Index, five stock catalogs, and a total of 134 stocks collected from the Shanghai Stock Exchange Market. The scaling exponent for each catalog is significantly larger compared with that for the stocks included in the catalog. Selecting a window with size 650, the evolution of scaling for the Shanghai Stock Index is obtained by the window's sliding along the series. Global patterns in the evolutionary process are captured from the smoothed evolutionary curve. By comparing the patterns with the important event list in the history of the considered stock market, the evolution of scaling is matched with the stock index series. We can find that the important events fit very well with global transitions of the scaling behaviors.