Philip Sommer

Mingshu Li, Bhaskarjit Sarmah, Dhruv Desai et al.

Due to the dynamic nature of financial markets, maintaining models that produce precise predictions over time is difficult. Often the goal isn't just point prediction but determining uncertainty. Quantifying uncertainty, especially the aleatoric uncertainty due to the unpredictable nature of market drivers, helps investors understand varying risk levels. Recently, quantile regression forests (QRF) have emerged as a promising solution: Unlike most basic quantile regression methods that need separate models for each quantile, quantile regression forests estimate the entire conditional distribution of the target variable with a single model, while retaining all the salient features of a typical random forest. We introduce a novel approach to compute quantile regressions from random forests that leverages the proximity (i.e., distance metric) learned by the model and infers the conditional distribution of the target variable. We evaluate the proposed methodology using publicly available datasets and then apply it towards the problem of forecasting the average daily volume of corporate bonds. We show that using quantile regression using Random Forest proximities demonstrates superior performance in approximating conditional target distributions and prediction intervals to the original version of QRF. We also demonstrate that the proposed framework is significantly more computationally efficient than traditional approaches to quantile regressions.

Mingshu Li, Dhruv Desai, Jerinsh Jeyapaulraj et al.

Accurately measuring portfolio similarity is critical for a wide range of financial applications, including Exchange-traded Fund (ETF) recommendation, portfolio trading, and risk alignment. Existing similarity measures often rely on exact asset overlap or static distance metrics, which fail to capture similarities among the constituents (e.g., securities within the portfolio) as well as nuanced relationships between partially overlapping portfolios with heterogeneous weights. We introduce STRAPSim (Semantic, Two-level, Residual-Aware Portfolio Similarity), a novel method that computes portfolio similarity by matching constituents based on semantic similarity, weighting them according to their portfolio share, and aggregating results via residual-aware greedy alignment. We benchmark our approach against Jaccard, weighted Jaccard, as well as BERTScore-inspired variants across public classification, regression, and recommendation tasks, as well as on corporate bond ETF datasets. Empirical results show that our method consistently outperforms baselines in predictive accuracy and ranking alignment, achieving the highest Spearman correlation with return-based similarity. By leveraging constituent-aware matching and dynamic reweighting, portfolio similarity offers a scalable, interpretable framework for comparing structured asset baskets, demonstrating its utility in ETF benchmarking, portfolio construction, and systematic execution.