arXiv Machine Learning

(Mis)Understanding Benign Overfitting in Equity Return Prediction

The paper examines whether benign overfitting—where highly overparameterized models still predict well—occurs in equity return prediction. It finds a double‑descent risk curve for ridgeless models and shows that while ridge regularization slightly improves performance, the advantage vanishes at high parameter‑to‑observation ratios. Ultimately, both models fail to beat a simple historical average, indicating that standard equity predictors lack genuine forecasting power even with flexible machine learning methods.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Tabular Deep Learning for Algorithmic Trading: Cross-Regime Bayesian Optimisation for Equity Signal Generation

The paper explores tabular deep learning for equity signal generation, training five model classes on daily data from about 300 large‑cap US stocks over eleven years. By using Bayesian optimisation that targets trading performance across three distinct market regimes, the authors achieve regime‑robust hyperparameter selection, yielding out‑of‑sample signal precision above random and a Hybrid ensemble (XGBoost + TabNet) with an annualised return of 51.26% and a Sharpe ratio of 2.44. The study also finds that alternative data adds limited value beyond technical and fundamental features, and that the ensemble’s outperformance is driven by stock selection rather than market exposure.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 25

How Good Can Linear Models Be for Time-Series Forecasting?

Time-series forecasting research has been moving steadily toward larger architectures, from specialized transformers to general-purpose foundation models, on the assumption that capacity is what unlocks accuracy. We take the opposite position: most of the gap can be closed at far lower cost by tuning preprocessing rather than scaling models.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Is attention truly all we need? An empirical study of asset pricing in pretrained RNN sparse and global attention models

arXiv:2508. 19006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This study investigates the pre-trained RNN attention models with the mainstream attention mechanisms, such as additive attention, Luong's three attentions, global self-attention and sliding window sparse attention, for the empirical asset pricing research on the top 420 large-cap US stocks.

By Shanyan Lai
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Addressing Market Regime Changes and Heavy-Tailed Returns in Portfolio Optimization via Bayesian VAR and Elliptical Black-Litterman

arXiv:2606. 09104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) frameworks for portfolio optimization have shown promise for their ability to learn allocation rules dynamically from market data.

By Daniil Mikriukov (University of Liverpool, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Ruoyu Sun (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Angelos Stefanidis (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Jionglong Su (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Zhengyong Jiang (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University)