Testing the dinosaur hypothesis under empirical datasets

Abstract

In this paper we present the Dinosaur Hypothesis, which states that the behaviour of a market never settles down and that the population of predictors continually co-evolves with this market. To the best of our knowledge, this observation has only been made and tested under artificial datasets, but not with real data. In this work, we attempt to formalize this hypothesis by presenting its main constituents. We also test it with empirical data, under 10 international datasets. Results show that for the majority of the datasets the Dinosaur Hypothesis is not supported. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.