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on Forecasting |
| By: | Yanlong Wang; Jian Xu; Fei Ma; Hongkang Zhang; Hang Yu; Tiantian Gao; Yu Wang; Haochen You; Shao-Lun Huang; Danny Dongning Sun; Xiao-Ping Zhang |
| Abstract: | Financial time series forecasting is both highly significant and challenging. Previous approaches typically standardized time series data before feeding it into forecasting models, but this encoding process inherently leads to a loss of important information. Moreover, past time series models generally require fixed numbers of variables or lookback window lengths, which further limits the scalability of time series forecasting. Besides, the interpretability and the uncertainty in forecasting remain areas requiring further research, as these factors directly impact the reliability and practical value of predictions. To address these issues, we first construct a diverse financial image-text dataset (FVLDB) and develop the Uncertainty-adjusted Group Relative Policy Optimization (UARPO) method to enable the model not only output predictions but also analyze the uncertainty of those predictions. We then proposed FinZero, a multimodal pre-trained model finetuned by UARPO to perform reasoning, prediction, and analytical understanding on the FVLDB financial time series. Extensive experiments validate that FinZero exhibits strong adaptability and scalability. After fine-tuning with UARPO, FinZero achieves an approximate 13.48\% improvement in prediction accuracy over GPT-4o in the high-confidence group, demonstrating the effectiveness of reinforcement learning fine-tuning in multimodal large model, including in financial time series forecasting tasks. |
| Date: | 2025–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2509.08742 |
| By: | Harrison Katz; Robert E. Weiss |
| Abstract: | High-dimensional vector autoregressive (VAR) models offer a versatile framework for multivariate time series analysis, yet face critical challenges from over-parameterization and uncertain lag order. In this paper, we systematically compare three Bayesian shrinkage priors (horseshoe, lasso, and normal) and two frequentist regularization approaches (ridge and nonparametric shrinkage) under three carefully crafted simulation scenarios. These scenarios encompass (i) overfitting in a low-dimensional setting, (ii) sparse high-dimensional processes, and (iii) a combined scenario where both large dimension and overfitting complicate inference. We evaluate each method in quality of parameter estimation (root mean squared error, coverage, and interval length) and out-of-sample forecasting (one-step-ahead forecast RMSE). Our findings show that local-global Bayesian methods, particularly the horseshoe, dominate in maintaining accurate coverage and minimizing parameter error, even when the model is heavily over-parameterized. Frequentist ridge often yields competitive point forecasts but underestimates uncertainty, leading to sub-nominal coverage. A real-data application using macroeconomic variables from Canada illustrates how these methods perform in practice, reinforcing the advantages of local-global priors in stabilizing inference when dimension or lag order is inflated. |
| Date: | 2025–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2504.05489 |
| By: | Jonathan Garita-Garita (Department of Economic Research, Central Bank of Costa Rica); César Ulate-Sancho (Department of Economic Research, Central Bank of Costa Rica) |
| Abstract: | This paper offers a daily-frequency analysis and short-term forecasting of Costa Rica’s foreign currency market using deep neural network algorithms. These algo-rithms efficiently integrates multiple high-frequency data to capture trends, seasonal patterns, and daily movements in the exchange rate from 2017 to March 2025. The results indicate that these models excels in predicting the observed exchange rate up to five days in advance, outperforming traditional time series forecasting methods in terms of accuracy. *** Resumen: Este artículo realiza un análisis de alta frecuencia del mercado de divisas de Costa Rica utilizando algoritmos de redes neuronales profundas. Se emplean datos diarios de acceso público de MONEX desde 2017 hasta marzo de 2025 para identificar quiebres de tendencia, patrones estacionales y la importancia relativa de las variables explicativas que determinan los movimientos diarios del tipo de cambio en MONEX. El modelo calibrado muestra una alta precisión para comprender la información histórica y realizar proyecciones del tipo de cambio a cinco días. Los resultados sugieren que los movimientos observados del tipo de cambio en 2024 están alineados con su tendencia y que existen factores estacionales significativos que influyen en el tipo de cambio a lo largo del año. |
| Keywords: | Exchange Rate, Forecast, Deep Neural Network, Tipo de cambio, Pronóstico, Redes neuronales profundas |
| JEL: | C45 C53 F31 O24 |
| Date: | 2025–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:apk:doctra:2505 |
| By: | Marcelo C. Medeiros; Jeronymo M. Pinro |
| Abstract: | The forecasting combination puzzle is a well-known phenomenon in forecasting literature, stressing the challenge of outperforming the simple average when aggregating forecasts from diverse methods. This study proposes a Reinforcement Learning - based framework as a dynamic model selection approach to address this puzzle. Our framework is evaluated through extensive forecasting exercises using simulated and real data. Specifically, we analyze the M4 Competition dataset and the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). This research introduces an adaptable methodology for selecting and combining forecasts under uncertainty, offering a promising advancement in resolving the forecasting combination puzzle. |
| Date: | 2025–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2508.20795 |
| By: | Jakub Micha\'nk\'ow |
| Abstract: | This study evaluates deep neural networks for forecasting probability distributions of financial returns. 1D convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architectures are used to forecast parameters of three probability distributions: Normal, Student's t, and skewed Student's t. Using custom negative log-likelihood loss functions, distribution parameters are optimized directly. The models are tested on six major equity indices (S\&P 500, BOVESPA, DAX, WIG, Nikkei 225, and KOSPI) using probabilistic evaluation metrics including Log Predictive Score (LPS), Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), and Probability Integral Transform (PIT). Results show that deep learning models provide accurate distributional forecasts and perform competitively with classical GARCH models for Value-at-Risk estimation. The LSTM with skewed Student's t distribution performs best across multiple evaluation criteria, capturing both heavy tails and asymmetry in financial returns. This work shows that deep neural networks are viable alternatives to traditional econometric models for financial risk assessment and portfolio management. |
| Date: | 2025–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2508.18921 |
| By: | Ziyao Wang; Svetlozar T Rachev |
| Abstract: | Financial returns are known to exhibit heavy tails, volatility clustering and abrupt jumps that are poorly captured by classical diffusion models. Advances in machine learning have enabled highly flexible functional forms for conditional means and volatilities, yet few models deliver interpretable state--dependent tail risk, capture multiple forecast horizons and yield distributions amenable to backtesting and execution. This paper proposes a neural L\'evy jump--diffusion framework that jointly learns, as functions of observable state variables, the conditional drift, diffusion, jump intensity and jump size distribution. We show how a single shared encoder yields multiple forecasting heads corresponding to distinct horizons (daily, weekly, etc.), facilitating multi--horizon density forecasts and risk measures. The state vector includes conventional price and volume features as well as novel complexity measures such as permutation entropy and recurrence quantification analysis determinism, which quantify predictability in the underlying process. Estimation is based on a quasi--maximum likelihood approach that separates diffusion and jump contributions via bipower variation weights and incorporates monotonicity and smoothness regularisation to ensure identifiability. A cost--aware portfolio optimiser translates the model's conditional densities into implementable trading strategies under leverage, turnover and no--trade--band constraints. Extensive empirical analyses on cross--sectional equity data demonstrate improved calibration, sharper tail control and economically significant risk reduction relative to baseline diffusive and GARCH benchmarks. The proposed framework is therefore an interpretable, testable and practically deployable method for state--dependent risk and density forecasting. |
| Date: | 2025–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2509.01041 |
| By: | Fiona Xiao Jingyi; Lili Liu |
| Abstract: | Forecasting central bank policy decisions remains a persistent challenge for investors, financial institutions, and policymakers due to the wide-reaching impact of monetary actions. In particular, anticipating shifts in the U.S. federal funds rate is vital for risk management and trading strategies. Traditional methods relying only on structured macroeconomic indicators often fall short in capturing the forward-looking cues embedded in central bank communications. This study examines whether predictive accuracy can be enhanced by integrating structured data with unstructured textual signals from Federal Reserve communications. We adopt a multi-modal framework, comparing traditional machine learning models, transformer-based language models, and deep learning architectures in both unimodal and hybrid settings. Our results show that hybrid models consistently outperform unimodal baselines. The best performance is achieved by combining TF-IDF features of FOMC texts with economic indicators in an XGBoost classifier, reaching a test AUC of 0.83. FinBERT-based sentiment features marginally improve ranking but perform worse in classification, especially under class imbalance. SHAP analysis reveals that sparse, interpretable features align more closely with policy-relevant signals. These findings underscore the importance of integrating textual and structured signals transparently. For monetary policy forecasting, simpler hybrid models can offer both accuracy and interpretability, delivering actionable insights for researchers and decision-makers. |
| Date: | 2025–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2506.22763 |
| By: | Giorgos Demosthenous; Chryssis Georgiou; Eliada Polydorou |
| Abstract: | This study investigates the impact of data source diversity on the performance of cryptocurrency forecasting models by integrating various data categories, including technical indicators, on-chain metrics, sentiment and interest metrics, traditional market indices, and macroeconomic indicators. We introduce the Crypto100 index, representing the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, and propose a novel feature reduction algorithm to identify the most impactful and resilient features from diverse data sources. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that data source diversity significantly enhances the predictive performance of forecasting models across different time horizons. Key findings include the paramount importance of on-chain metrics for both short-term and long-term predictions, the growing relevance of traditional market indices and macroeconomic indicators for longer-term forecasts, and substantial improvements in model accuracy when diverse data sources are utilized. These insights help demystify the short-term and long-term driving factors of the cryptocurrency market and lay the groundwork for developing more accurate and resilient forecasting models. |
| Date: | 2025–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2506.21246 |
| By: | Sourish Das |
| Abstract: | This paper develops a Bayesian Generalised Pareto Regression (GPR) model to forecast extreme losses in Indian equity markets, with a focus on the Nifty 50 index. Extreme negative returns, though rare, can cause significant financial disruption, and accurate modelling of such events is essential for effective risk management. Traditional Generalised Pareto Distribution (GPD) models often ignore market conditions; in contrast, our framework links the scale parameter to covariates using a log-linear function, allowing tail risk to respond dynamically to market volatility. We examine four prior choices for Bayesian regularisation of regression coefficients: Cauchy, Lasso (Laplace), Ridge (Gaussian), and Zellner's g-prior. Simulation results suggest that the Cauchy prior delivers the best trade-off between predictive accuracy and model simplicity, achieving the lowest RMSE, AIC, and BIC values. Empirically, we apply the model to large negative returns (exceeding 5%) in the Nifty 50 index. Volatility measures from the Nifty 50, S&P 500, and gold are used as covariates to capture both domestic and global risk drivers. Our findings show that tail risk increases significantly with higher market volatility. In particular, both S&P 500 and gold volatilities contribute meaningfully to crash prediction, highlighting global spillover and flight-to-safety effects. The proposed GPR model offers a robust and interpretable approach for tail risk forecasting in emerging markets. It improves upon traditional EVT-based models by incorporating real-time financial indicators, making it useful for practitioners, policymakers, and financial regulators concerned with systemic risk and stress testing. |
| Date: | 2025–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2506.17549 |
| By: | Todd Clark; Florian Huber; Gary Koop |
| Abstract: | This paper proposes a Vector Autoregression augmented with nonlinear factors that are modeled nonparametrically using regression trees. There are four main advantages of our model. First, modeling potential nonlinearities nonparametrically lessens the risk of mis-specification. Second, the use of factor methods ensures that departures from linearity are modeled parsimoniously. In particular, they exhibit functional pooling where a small number of nonlinear factors are used to model common nonlinearities across variables. Third, Bayesian computation using MCMC is straightforward even in very high dimensional models, allowing for efficient, equation by equation estimation, thus avoiding computational bottlenecks that arise in popular alternatives such as the time varying parameter VAR. Fourth, existing methods for identifying structural economic shocks in linear factor models can be adapted for the nonlinear case in a straightforward fashion using our model. Exercises involving artificial and macroeconomic data illustrate the properties of our model and its usefulness for forecasting and structural economic analysis. |
| Date: | 2025–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2508.13972 |
| By: | Mehran Akbari; Christian Bauer; Matthias Neuenkirch; Dennis Umlandt |
| Abstract: | Economic expectations play a central role in financial markets, yet investors often disagree about the economy’s future. This disagreement has long been viewed as a potential driver of asset prices, but it remains unclear whether it reflects mispricing or a priced source of risk. We address this question by constructing monthly disagreement indices from Consensus Economics forecasts from 24 OECD markets. Firm-level exposure to economic disagreement is estimated through return regressions. Results reveal pronounced cross-country heterogeneity. In developed markets, particularly the United States, greater exposure to disagreement consistently predicts lower future returns, supporting the mispricing hypothesis. Smaller markets exhibit mixed patterns, with some evidence of positive risk premia, while other cases show no significant effect. These findings provide new international evidence that the pricing of forecast disagreement is context-dependent, shaped by market structure and institutional depth. |
| Keywords: | Asset Pricing, Consensus Economics, Forecast Disagreement, Macroeconomic Forecasts |
| JEL: | D84 G12 G14 G15 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:trr:wpaper:202507 |
| By: | Nicholas Gray; Finn Lattimore; Kate McLoughlin; Callan Windsor |
| Abstract: | In a world of increasing policy uncertainty, central banks are relying more on soft information sources to complement traditional economic statistics and model-based forecasts. One valuable source of soft information comes from intelligence gathered through central bank liaison programs -- structured programs in which central bank staff regularly talk with firms to gather insights. This paper introduces a new text analytics and retrieval tool that efficiently processes, organises, and analyses liaison intelligence gathered from firms using modern natural language processing techniques. The textual dataset spans 25 years, integrates new information as soon as it becomes available, and covers a wide range of business sizes and industries. The tool uses both traditional text analysis techniques and powerful language models to provide analysts and researchers with three key capabilities: (1) quickly querying the entire history of business liaison meeting notes; (2) zooming in on particular topics to examine their frequency (topic exposure) and analysing the associated tone and uncertainty of the discussion; and (3) extracting precise numerical values from the text, such as firms' reported figures for wages and prices growth. We demonstrate how these capabilities are useful for assessing economic conditions by generating text-based indicators of wages growth and incorporating them into a nowcasting model. We find that adding these text-based features to current best-in-class predictive models, combined with the use of machine learning methods designed to handle many predictors, significantly improves the performance of nowcasts for wages growth. Predictive gains are driven by a small number of features, indicating a sparse signal in contrast to other predictive problems in macroeconomics, where the signal is typically dense. |
| Date: | 2025–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2506.18505 |
| By: | Umberto Collodel |
| Abstract: | This paper develops a novel method to simulate financial market reactions to European Central Bank (ECB) press conferences using a Large Language Model (LLM). We create a behavioral, agent-based simulation of 30 synthetic traders, each with distinct risk preferences, cognitive biases, and interpretive styles. These agents forecast Euro interest rate swap levels at 3-month, 2-year, and 10-year maturities, with the variation across forecasts serving as a measure of market uncertainty or disagreement. We evaluate three prompting strategies, naive, few-shot (enriched with historical data), and an advanced iterative 'LLM-as-a-Judge' framework, to assess the effect of prompt design on predictive performance. Even the naive approach generates a strong correlation (roughly 0.5) between synthetic disagreement and actual market outcomes, particularly for longer-term maturities. The LLM-as-a-Judge framework further improves accuracy at the first iteration. These results demonstrate that LLM-driven simulations can capture interpretive uncertainty beyond traditional measures, providing central banks with a practical tool to anticipate market reactions, refine communication strategies, and enhance financial stability. |
| Date: | 2025–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2508.13635 |
| By: | Shaofeng Kang; Zeying Tian |
| Abstract: | We propose a two-level, learning-based portfolio method (RL-BHRP) that spreads risk across sectors and stocks, and adjusts exposures as market conditions change. Using U.S. Equities from 2012 to mid-2025, we design the model using 2012 to 2019 data, and evaluate it out-of-sample from 2020 to 2025 against a sector index built from exchange-traded funds and a static risk-balanced portfolio. Over the test window, the adaptive portfolio compounds wealth by approximately 120 percent, compared with 101 percent for the static comparator and 91 percent for the sector benchmark. The average annual growth is roughly 15 percent, compared to 13 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Gains are achieved without significant deviations from the benchmark and with peak-to-trough losses comparable to those of the alternatives, indicating that the method adds value while remaining diversified and investable. Weight charts show gradual shifts rather than abrupt swings, reflecting disciplined rebalancing and the cost-aware design. Overall, the results support risk-balanced, adaptive allocation as a practical approach to achieving stronger and more stable long-term performance. |
| Date: | 2025–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2508.11856 |
| By: | Christian Glocker (WIFO); Serguei Kaniovski |
| Abstract: | We propose a methodology for constructing confidence intervals for macroeconomic forecasts that directly incorporate quantitative measures of uncertainty – such as survey-based indicators, stock market volatility, and policy uncertainty. By allowing the width of confidence intervals to vary systematically with prevailing uncertainty conditions, this approach yields more informative and context-sensitive intervals than traditional, static methods relying solely on past forecast errors. An empirical application using Austrian data demonstrates that uncertainty measures significantly explain the variation in forecast errors, underscoring the value of integrating these indicators for improved communication and analytical robustness of economic projections. |
| Keywords: | Confidence intervals, Forecast errors, Uncertainty, SUR |
| Date: | 2025–09–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wfo:wpaper:y:2025:i:710 |
| By: | Sedigheh Mahdavi (Kristin); Jiating (Kristin); Chen; Pradeep Kumar Joshi; Lina Huertas Guativa; Upmanyu Singh |
| Abstract: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been employed in financial decision making, enhancing analytical capabilities for investment strategies. Traditional investment strategies often utilize quantitative models, fundamental analysis, and technical indicators. However, LLMs have introduced new capabilities to process and analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data, extract meaningful insights, and enhance decision-making in real-time. This survey provides a structured overview of recent research on LLMs within the financial domain, categorizing research contributions into four main frameworks: LLM-based Frameworks and Pipelines, Hybrid Integration Methods, Fine-Tuning and Adaptation Approaches, and Agent-Based Architectures. This study provides a structured review of recent LLMs research on applications in stock selection, risk assessment, sentiment analysis, trading, and financial forecasting. By reviewing the existing literature, this study highlights the capabilities, challenges, and potential directions of LLMs in financial markets. |
| Date: | 2025–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2507.01990 |