A Frequency-Controlled Comparison of Tick- and Minute-Based Information Bars for Cryptocurrency Markets
This paper provides a controlled comparison of six information bar types (dollar, volume, volatility, range, Renko, and hybrid bars) constructed from both raw Binance aggTrade tick data and one-minute OHLCV bars for the BTCUSDT USDT-margined perpetual futures market over a six-year period spanning January 2020 to December 2025, and evaluated against fixed-interval time-bar baselines. Both pipelines share a common adaptive EMA calibration framework; the tick pipeline additionally uses strictly tick-native activity signals, isolating data resolution as the sole experimental variable. Results across eight statistical quality criteria reveal that the tick advantage is bar-type-specific and most pronounced in bar types whose activity signals are most sensitive to intra-minute price dynamics: tick Renko bars achieve the smallest random-walk deviation recorded ($|\mathrm{VR}(4){-}1| = 0.020$, lag-1 autocorrelation $= 0.002$), and tick volatility bars reduce serial dependence by 69\% relative to the minute baseline ($|\mathrm{VR}(4){-}1|: 0.028$ versus $0.089$). In the multi-regime six-year sample, normality improvements are regime-dependent and secondary: the extreme market events of 2020--2022 inflate fat tails across all bar types, and Ljung-Box independence is rejected for all series at the sample sizes studied. A matched-frequency robustness analysis shows that the apparent tick underperformance on distributional criteria is largely a sampling-frequency artefact: when tick series are coarsened to the minute pipeline's bar count, frequency-matched tick dollar bars lead on all six criteria and matched tick volatility bars attain LB $p = 0.51$, recovering serial independence that the raw oversampled series rejects.