Multifractal Techniques (MF-DFA) and Its Applications in Financial and Economic Complexity

Dear Colleagues,

Multifractality has become a fundamental analytical perspective for examining the nonlinear, heterogeneous, and scale-dependent dynamics that characterize modern financial and economic systems. The multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) framework, together with its cross-correlation variants such as MF-DCCA and MFCCA, provides a powerful set of techniques for quantifying long-range dependence, structural breaks, and volatility asymmetries that are often concealed in traditional linear or stationary models. These methods have been increasingly employed to investigate diverse phenomena such as market efficiency, contagion, systemic risk, and portfolio diversification across global financial markets.

This Special Issue aims to advance theoretical, computational, and empirical frontiers in multifractal analysis and its applications in finance and economics. We welcome studies that develop novel algorithms or refine existing methods to enhance estimation accuracy, robustness, and visualization. Contributions that bridge multifractal techniques with data-intensive approaches including entropy and information theory, wavelet and spectral analysis, network science, or machine learning are particularly encouraged, as they enable richer insights from complex financial and economic datasets.

We seek submissions that employ multifractal analysis to explore critical themes such as volatility clustering, tail risk, contagion dynamics, and structural transitions in equity, bond, commodity, foreign exchange, and cryptocurrency markets. Empirical papers analysing high-frequency trading data, macro-financial linkages, or cross-market dependencies are particularly welcome, as they demonstrate how multifractal scaling and cross-correlation methods can uncover hidden dependencies and multi-scale interactions in real-world data. Studies addressing data quality challenges such as nonstationarity, missing observations, or irregular sampling are equally encouraged.

Alongside empirical and methodological papers, this Special Issue also welcomes replication studies, comparative analyses with alternative nonlinear frameworks, and review articles that consolidate best practices in multifractal data analysis. Such contributions are vital to building reproducible pipelines, promoting transparent research, and facilitating the broader adoption of multifractal techniques within the financial and economic sciences.

The goal of this Special Issue is to curate a collection of works that showcase the analytical strength and practical relevance of multifractal methods in understanding the complexity, resilience, and evolving structure of financial systems in an increasingly data-driven world.

Topics of Interest (headings only; broad scope)

• Foundations of multifractality and MF-DFA;
• Algorithmic, computational, and reproducible pipelines;
• Multifractal cross-correlations (MF-DCCA and MFCCA) in financial systems;
• Asymmetric multifractality and regime dependence;
• Market efficiency, volatility, contagion, and tail risk;
• Non-stationarity, structural breaks, and temporal aggregation;
• Comparative studies (MF-DFA versus wavelet, entropy, and WTMM frameworks);
• Integration with AI, entropy, and network-based approaches;
• Data-driven applications and empirical analysis in finance and economics;
• High-frequency trading, cryptocurrency, and macro-financial linkages.

Dr. Ghulam Mujtaba
Dr. Saira Ashfaq
Prof. Dr. Syed Jawad Hussain Shahzad
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Fractal and Fractional is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• MF-DFA
• multifractality
• MF-DCCA
• asymmetric scaling
• financial complexity
• volatility dynamics
• contagion
• data analytics
• market efficiency
• cross-correlation