Thermodynamic Entropy in Quantum Statistics for Stock Market Networks

Abstract

The stock market is a dynamical system composed of intricate relationships between financial entities, such as banks, corporations, and institutions. Such a complex interactive system can be represented by the network structure. The underlying mechanism of stock exchange establishes a time‐evolving network among companies and individuals, which characterise the correlations of stock prices in the time sequential trades. Here, we develop a novel technique in quantum statistics to analyse the financial market evolution. We commence from heat bath analogy where the normalised Laplacian matrix plays the role of the Hamiltonian operator of the network. The eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian specify energy states of the network. These states are occupied by either indistinguishable bosons or fermions with corresponding Bose‐Einstein and Fermi‐Dirac statistics. Using the relevant partition functions, we develop the thermodynamic entropy to explore dynamic network characterisations. We conduct the experiments to apply this novel method to identify the significant variance in network structure during the financial crisis. The thermodynamic entropy provides an excellent framework to represent the variations taking place in the stock market.