Andre Python

Hao Guo, Andre Python, Yu Liu

In spatial regression models, spatial heterogeneity may be considered with either continuous or discrete specifications. The latter is related to delineation of spatially connected regions with homogeneous relationships between variables (spatial regimes). Although various regionalization algorithms have been proposed and studied in the field of spatial analytics, methods to optimize spatial regimes have been largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose two new algorithms for spatial regime delineation, two-stage K-Models and Regional-K-Models. We also extend the classic Automatic Zoning Procedure to spatial regression context. The proposed algorithms are applied to a series of synthetic datasets and two real-world datasets. Results indicate that all three algorithms achieve superior or comparable performance to existing approaches, while the two-stage K-Models algorithm largely outperforms existing approaches on model fitting, region reconstruction, and coefficient estimation. Our work enriches the spatial analytics toolbox to explore spatial heterogeneous processes.

Alvaro Paredes Amorin, Andre Python, Christoph Weisser

Large language models (LLMs) play an increasingly important role in finan- cial markets analysis by capturing signals from complex and heterogeneous textual data sources, such as tweets, news articles, reports, and microblogs. However, their performance is dependent on large computational resources and proprietary datasets, which are costly, restricted, and therefore inacces- sible to many researchers and practitioners. To reflect realistic situations we investigate the ability of lightweight open-source LLMs - smaller and publicly available models designed to operate with limited computational resources - to generalize sentiment understanding from financial datasets of varying sizes, sources, formats, and languages. We compare the benchmark finance natural language processing (NLP) model, FinBERT, and three open-source lightweight LLMs, DeepSeek-LLM 7B, Llama3 8B Instruct, and Qwen3 8B on five publicly available datasets: FinancialPhraseBank, Financial Question Answering, Gold News Sentiment, Twitter Sentiment and Chinese Finance Sentiment. We find that LLMs, specially Qwen3 8B and Llama3 8B, perform best in most scenarios, even from using only 5% of the available training data. These results hold in zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. Our findings indicate that lightweight, open-source large language models (LLMs) consti- tute a cost-effective option, as they can achieve competitive performance on heterogeneous textual data even when trained on only a limited subset of the extensive annotated corpora that are typically deemed necessary.

Alvaro Paredes Amorin, Andre Python, Christoph Weisser

By capturing the prevailing sentiment and market mood, textual data has become increasingly vital for forecasting commodity prices, particularly in metal markets. However, the effectiveness of lightweight, finetuned large language models (LLMs) in extracting predictive signals for aluminum prices, and the specific market conditions under which these signals are most informative, remains under-explored. This study generates monthly sentiment scores from English and Chinese news headlines (Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, and China News Service) and integrates them with traditional tabular data, including base metal indices, exchange rates, inflation rates, and energy prices. We evaluate the predictive performance and economic utility of these models through long-short simulations on the Shanghai Metal Exchange from 2007 to 2024. Our results demonstrate that during periods of high volatility, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models incorporating sentiment data from a finetuned Qwen3 model (Sharpe ratio 1.04) significantly outperform baseline models using tabular data alone (Sharpe ratio 0.23). Subsequent analysis elucidates the nuanced roles of news sources, topics, and event types in aluminum price forecasting.