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Global Neural Networks and The Data Scaling Effect in Financial Time Series Forecasting

Chen Liu, Minh-Ngoc Tran, Chao Wang, Richard Gerlach, Robert Kohn

arXiv 5 Sep 2023 · Econometrics

arXiv:2309.02072 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Neural networks have revolutionized many empirical fields, yet their application to financial time series forecasting remains controversial. In this study, we demonstrate that the conventional practice of estimating models locally in data-scarce environments may underlie the mixed empirical performance observed in prior work. By focusing on volatility forecasting, we employ a dataset comprising over 10,000 global stocks and implement a global estimation strategy that pools information across cross-sections. Our econometric analysis reveals that forecasting accuracy improves markedly as the training dataset becomes larger and more heterogeneous. Notably, even with as little as 12 months of data, globally trained networks deliver robust predictions for individual stocks and portfolios that are not even in the training dataset. Furthermore, our interpretation of the model dynamics shows that these networks not only capture key stylized facts of volatility but also exhibit resilience to outliers and rapid adaptation to market regime changes. These findings underscore the importance of leveraging extensive and diverse datasets in financial forecasting and advocate for a shift from traditional local training approaches to integrated global estimation methods.

Citation extraction

42
references
57
in-text mentions
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distinct cited
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main-text words

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Kaplan, Jared, McCandlish, Sam, Henighan, Tom, Brown, Tom B., Chess,… (2020) Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models0.8434375%
2Zhai, Xiaohua, Kolesnikov, Alexander, Houlsby, Neil, Beyer, Lucas (2022) Scaling Vision Transformers0.8434375%
3Makridakis, Spyros, Spiliotis, Evangelos, Assimakopoulos, Vassilios (2018) Statistical and Machine Learning forecasting methods: Concerns and ways forward0.73732100%
4Montero-Manso, Pablo, Hyndman, Rob J (2021) Principles and algorithms for forecasting groups of time series: Locality and globality0.58531100%
5Chung, Junyoung, Gulcehre, Caglar, Cho, KyungHyun, Bengio, Yoshua (2014) Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling0.5112250%
6Bollerslev, Tim (1986) Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity0.51121100%
7Fissler, Tobias, Ziegel, Johanna F (2016) Higher order elicitability and Osband’s principle0.51121100%
8Goodfellow, Ian, Bengio, Yoshua, Courville, Aaron (2016) Deep learning0.51121100%
9Hansen, Peter R., Lunde, Asger, Nason, James M (2011) The Model Confidence Set0.51121100%
10LeCun, Yann, Bengio, Yoshua, Hinton, Geoffrey (2015) Deep learning0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 42 scored citations.