Stability and Hierarchy of Quasi-Stationary States: Financial Markets as an Example

We combine geometric data analysis and stochastic modeling to describe the collective dynamics of complex systems. As an example we apply this approach to financial data and focus on the non-stationarity of the market correlation structure. We identify the dominating variable and extract its explicit stochastic model. This allows us to establish a connection between its time evolution and known historical events on the market. We discuss the dynamics, the stability and the hierarchy of the recently proposed quasi-stationary market states.