Econophysics Approaches to Large-Scale Business Data and Financial Crisis

The 7th international conference on applications of physics in financial analysis was held in Tokyo, Japan, March 1-5, 2009. This interdisciplinary conference has been taking place every one or two years since 1999 and forms a unique forum for advanced research, covering new technologies, developments, methods to analyze large-scale business data. In the past, such types of information were studied only by economists and management scholars. However, more recently, researchers from other fields, such as physics, mathematics, and information sciences have become interested in such kind of data and, based on novel empirical approaches to search for regularities and laws akin to those in the natural science, have produced intriguing results.