Representation Learning for Financial Time-Series Forecasting

Abstract

Accurate prediction of financial time series is still a difficult problem as financial markets display high volatility, non-linearity and stochasticity. Traditional forecasting methods necessitate extensive domain knowledge in designing technical indicators for subsequent analysis, often resulting in the loss of intricate time dependencies. The goal of the present study is to propose a framework allowing for learning representations automatically from raw financial data that are informative in downstream forecasting tasks. The proposed framework, contrasting predictive coding (CPC), is based on self-supervised representation learning. The learned embeddings are applied to Linear Regression, Random Forest and LSTM to predict the next-day log returns of three major foreign exchange currency pairs: EUR/USD, GBP/USD and USD/JPY. Evaluating the Performance of CPC-Generated Representations and Conventional Handcrafted Features on Forecasting Models trained on Historical Market Data. The LSTM with CPC context embeddings produces the best overall performance with a drop in mean squared error of 18%, directional prediction accuracy of roughly 59%, and better risk-adjusted trading performance with Sharpe ratios above 0.7. Additionally, the outcomes of transfer learning experiments reveal that a CPC encoder trained using one currency pair efficiently generalizes to other currency pairs. The results indicate that self-supervised representation learning can serve as an effective and scalable substitute for manual feature engineering in finance time-series forecasting.