Multi-task Learning for Financial Forecasting

Tao Ma, Guolin Ke

Published 2018-09-27Version 1

Financial forecasting is challenging and attractive in machine learning. There are many classic solutions, as well as many deep learning based methods, proposed to deal with it yielding encouraging performance. Stock time series forecasting is the most representative problem in financial forecasting. Due to the strong connections among stocks, the information valuable for forecasting is not only included in individual stocks, but also included in the stocks related to them. However, most previous works focus on one single stock, which easily ignore the valuable information in others. To leverage more information, in this paper, we propose a jointly forecasting approach to process multiple time series of related stocks simultaneously, using multi-task learning framework. Compared to the previous works, we use multiple networks to forecast multiple related stocks, using the shared and private information of them simultaneously through multi-task learning. Moreover, we propose an attention method learning an optimized weighted combination of shared and private information based on the idea of Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to help forecast. Experimental results on various data show improved forecasting performance over baseline methods.