Ling Yuan

Xinli Yu, Zheng Chen, Yuan Ling et al.

This paper presents a novel study on harnessing Large Language Models' (LLMs) outstanding knowledge and reasoning abilities for explainable financial time series forecasting. The application of machine learning models to financial time series comes with several challenges, including the difficulty in cross-sequence reasoning and inference, the hurdle of incorporating multi-modal signals from historical news, financial knowledge graphs, etc., and the issue of interpreting and explaining the model results. In this paper, we focus on NASDAQ-100 stocks, making use of publicly accessible historical stock price data, company metadata, and historical economic/financial news. We conduct experiments to illustrate the potential of LLMs in offering a unified solution to the aforementioned challenges. Our experiments include trying zero-shot/few-shot inference with GPT-4 and instruction-based fine-tuning with a public LLM model Open LLaMA. We demonstrate our approach outperforms a few baselines, including the widely applied classic ARMA-GARCH model and a gradient-boosting tree model. Through the performance comparison results and a few examples, we find LLMs can make a well-thought decision by reasoning over information from both textual news and price time series and extracting insights, leveraging cross-sequence information, and utilizing the inherent knowledge embedded within the LLM. Additionally, we show that a publicly available LLM such as Open-LLaMA, after fine-tuning, can comprehend the instruction to generate explainable forecasts and achieve reasonable performance, albeit relatively inferior in comparison to GPT-4.

Reza Ghaeini, Sadid A. Hasan, Vivek Datla et al.

We present a novel deep learning architecture to address the natural language inference (NLI) task. Existing approaches mostly rely on simple reading mechanisms for independent encoding of the premise and hypothesis. Instead, we propose a novel dependent reading bidirectional LSTM network (DR-BiLSTM) to efficiently model the relationship between a premise and a hypothesis during encoding and inference. We also introduce a sophisticated ensemble strategy to combine our proposed models, which noticeably improves final predictions. Finally, we demonstrate how the results can be improved further with an additional preprocessing step. Our evaluation shows that DR-BiLSTM obtains the best single model and ensemble model results achieving the new state-of-the-art scores on the Stanford NLI dataset.