In [[finance]], '''volatility clustering''' refers to the observation, asfirst noted as [[Benoît Mandelbrot|Mandelbrot]] (1963), that "large changes tend to be followed by large changes, of either sign, and small changes tend to be followed by small changes."<ref>Mandelbrot, B. B., [[https://www.jstor.org/stable/2351623| The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices]], The Journal of Business 36, No. 4, (1963), 394-419</ref> A quantitative manifestation of this fact is that, while returns themselves are uncorrelated, absolute returns <math>|r_{t}|</math> or their squares display a positive, significant and slowly decaying autocorrelation function: corr(|r{{sub|t}}|, |r{{sub|t+τ}} |) > 0 for τ ranging from a few minutes to several weeks.<ref>Cont, Rama (2005). "[https://doi.org/10.1007/1-84628-048-6_11 Long range dependence in financial markets]". In Lévy-Véhel J., Lutton E. (eds) Fractals in Engineering. Springer, London. pp. 159–179.</ref>
Observations of this type in financial time series have led to the use of [[GARCH]] models and mean-reverting [[stochastic volatility]] models in financial forecasting and [[Derivative (finance)|derivatives]] pricing. The [[ARCH]] ([[Robert F. Engle|Engle]], 1982) and [[GARCH]] ([[Tim Bollerslev|Bollerslev]], 1986) models aim to more accurately describe the phenomenon of volatility clustering and related effects such as [[kurtosis]]. The main idea behind these two widely used models is that volatility is dependent upon past realizations of the asset process and related volatility process. This is a more precise formulation of the intuition that asset [[Volatility (finance)|volatility]] tends to revert to some mean rather than remaining constant or moving in [[monotonic]] fashion over time.
