A Hypothesis Test for the Goodness-of-Fit of the Marginal Distribution of a Time Series with Application to Stablecoin Data

Abstract

A bootstrap-based hypothesis test of the goodness-of-fit for the marginal distribution of a time series is presented. Two metrics, the empirical survival Jensen–Shannon divergence (ESJS) and the Kolmogorov–Smirnov two-sample test statistic (KS2), are compared on four data sets—three stablecoin time series and a Bitcoin time series. We demonstrate that, after applying first-order differencing, all the data sets fit heavy-tailed α-stable distributions with 1<α<2 at the 95% confidence level. Moreover, ESJS is more powerful than KS2 on these data sets, since the widths of the derived confidence intervals for KS2 are, proportionately, much larger than those of ESJS.