Assessing Relative Volatility/Intermittency/Energy Dissipation

We introduce the notion of relative volatility/intermittency and demonstrate how relative volatility statistics can be used to estimate consistently the temporal variation of volatility/intermittency even when the data of interest are generated by a non-semimartingale, or a Brownian semistationary process in particular. While this estimation method is motivated by the assessment of relative energy dissipation in empirical data of turbulence, we apply it also to energy price data. Moreover, we develop a probabilistic asymptotic theory for relative power variations of Brownian semistationary processes and Ito semimartingales and discuss how it can be used for inference on relative volatility/intermittency.