Non-stationary neural network for stock return prediction

03/05/2020

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by   Steven Y. K. Wong, et al.

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We consider the problem of neural network training in a time-varying context. Machine learning algorithms have excelled in problems that do not change over time. However, problems encountered in financial markets are often non-stationary. We propose the online early stopping algorithm and show that a neural network trained using this algorithm can track a function changing with unknown dynamics. We applied the proposed algorithm to the stock return prediction problem studied in Gu et al. (2019) and achieved mean rank correlation of 4.69 also show that prominent factors, such as the size effect and momentum, exhibit time varying stock return predictiveness.