Understanding financial contagion and instability, especially during
financial crises, is an important issue in risk management. The
emergence of alternative high-risk and speculative asset classes such as
cryptocurrencies, make it imperative to effectively monitor the
financial connectivity between heterogeneous asset classes across time,
in conjunction with the associated risk, to avoid a substantial
breakdown of financial systems during turmoil periods. To address this
problem, this paper investigates the predictive capacity of time-varying
graph connectivity measures on tail and systemic risk for heterogeneous
asset classes. To this end, proper statistical and geometric rules are
defined first, to infer the dynamic graph topology of asset returns.
Then, a novel predictive signal is proposed to quantify and rank the
predictive power of dynamic nodal and global graph measures. Finally, a
minimum dominating set detection method is used to track the community
structure of our asset classes over time and study its consistency with
the time evolution of the top predictive measures. Our empirical
findings show a remarkable variability of the predictive potential for
the distinct connectivity measures, and reveal its importance in
designing alerting mechanisms for risk management.