IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/aah/create/2021-03.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A machine learning approach to volatility forecasting

Author

Listed:
  • Kim Christensen

    (Aarhus University and CREATES)

  • Mathias Siggaard

    (Aarhus University and CREATES)

  • Bezirgen Veliyev

    (Aarhus University and CREATES)

Abstract

We show that machine learning (ML) algorithms improve one-day-ahead forecasts of realized variance from 29 Dow Jones Industrial Average index stocks over the sample period 2001 - 2017. We inspect several ML approaches: Regularization, tree-based algorithms, and neural networks. Off-the-shelf ML implementations beat the Heterogeneous AutoRegressive (HAR) model, even when the only predictors employed are the daily, weekly, and monthly lag of realized variance. Moreover, ML algorithms are capable of extracting substantial more information from additional predictors of volatility, including firm-specific characteristics and macroeconomic indicators, relative to an extended HAR model (HAR-X). ML automatically deciphers the often nonlinear relationship among the variables, allowing to identify key associations driving volatility. With accumulated local effect (ALE) plots we show there is a general agreement about the set of the most dominant predictors, but disagreement on their ranking. We investigate the robustness of ML when a large number of irrelevant variables, exhibiting serial correlation and conditional heteroscedasticity, are added to the information set. We document sustained forecasting improvements also in this setting.

Suggested Citation

  • Kim Christensen & Mathias Siggaard & Bezirgen Veliyev, 2021. "A machine learning approach to volatility forecasting," CREATES Research Papers 2021-03, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
  • Handle: RePEc:aah:create:2021-03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repec.econ.au.dk/repec/creates/rp/21/rp21_03.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrea Bucci, 2020. "Realized Volatility Forecasting with Neural Networks," The Journal of Financial Econometrics, Society for Financial Econometrics, vol. 18(3), pages 502-531.
    2. Aruoba, S. BoraÄŸan & Diebold, Francis X. & Scotti, Chiara, 2009. "Real-Time Measurement of Business Conditions," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 27(4), pages 417-427.
    3. Fernandes, Marcelo & Medeiros, Marcelo C. & Scharth, Marcel, 2014. "Modeling and predicting the CBOE market volatility index," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 1-10.
    4. Asger Lunde & Peter R. Hansen, 2005. "A forecast comparison of volatility models: does anything beat a GARCH(1,1)?," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 20(7), pages 873-889.
    5. Francesco Audrino & Simon D. Knaus, 2016. "Lassoing the HAR Model: A Model Selection Perspective on Realized Volatility Dynamics," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(8-10), pages 1485-1521, December.
    6. Scott R. Baker & Nicholas Bloom & Steven J. Davis, 2016. "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 131(4), pages 1593-1636.
    7. Shihao Gu & Bryan Kelly & Dacheng Xiu, 2020. "Empirical Asset Pricing via Machine Learning," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 33(5), pages 2223-2273.
    8. Fulvio Corsi, 2009. "A Simple Approximate Long-Memory Model of Realized Volatility," The Journal of Financial Econometrics, Society for Financial Econometrics, vol. 7(2), pages 174-196, Spring.
    9. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Addendum: Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(5), pages 768-768, November.
    10. Hal R. Varian, 2014. "Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 28(2), pages 3-28, Spring.
    11. Donaldson, R. Glen & Kamstra, Mark, 1997. "An artificial neural network-GARCH model for international stock return volatility," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 4(1), pages 17-46, January.
    12. Christensen, Kim & Thyrsgaard, Martin & Veliyev, Bezirgen, 2019. "The realized empirical distribution function of stochastic variance with application to goodness-of-fit testing," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 212(2), pages 556-583.
    13. Peter R. Hansen & Asger Lunde & James M. Nason, 2011. "The Model Confidence Set," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 79(2), pages 453-497, March.
    14. Chuong Luong & Nikolai Dokuchaev, 2018. "Forecasting of Realised Volatility with the Random Forests Algorithm," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 11(4), pages 1-15, October.
    15. Shihao Gu & Bryan Kelly & Dacheng Xiu, 2020. "Empirical Asset Pricing via Machine Learning," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 33(5), pages 2223-2273.
    16. Mittnik, Stefan & Robinzonov, Nikolay & Spindler, Martin, 2015. "Stock market volatility: Identifying major drivers and the nature of their impact," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 1-14.
    17. Bollerslev, Tim & Patton, Andrew J. & Quaedvlieg, Rogier, 2016. "Exploiting the errors: A simple approach for improved volatility forecasting," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 192(1), pages 1-18.
    18. Andrew J. Patton & Kevin Sheppard, 2015. "Good Volatility, Bad Volatility: Signed Jumps and The Persistence of Volatility," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 97(3), pages 683-697, July.
    19. Torben G. Andersen & Tim Bollerslev & Francis X. Diebold, 2007. "Roughing It Up: Including Jump Components in the Measurement, Modeling, and Forecasting of Return Volatility," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 89(4), pages 701-720, November.
    20. Busch, Thomas & Christensen, Bent Jesper & Nielsen, Morten Ørregaard, 2011. "The role of implied volatility in forecasting future realized volatility and jumps in foreign exchange, stock, and bond markets," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 160(1), pages 48-57, January.
    21. Fulvio Corsi & Roberto Renò, 2012. "Discrete-Time Volatility Forecasting With Persistent Leverage Effect and the Link With Continuous-Time Volatility Modeling," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(3), pages 368-380, January.
    22. Tim Bollerslev & Jia Li & Yuan Xue, 2018. "Volume, Volatility, and Public News Announcements," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 85(4), pages 2005-2041.
    23. Andersen, Torben G. & Bollerslev, Tim & Diebold, Francis X. & Ebens, Heiko, 2001. "The distribution of realized stock return volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(1), pages 43-76, July.
    24. Robert F. Engle & Eric Ghysels & Bumjean Sohn, 2013. "Stock Market Volatility and Macroeconomic Fundamentals," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(3), pages 776-797, July.
    25. Eric Hillebrand & Marcelo Medeiros, 2010. "The Benefits of Bagging for Forecast Models of Realized Volatility," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(5-6), pages 571-593.
    26. Audrino, Francesco & Corsi, Fulvio, 2010. "Modeling tick-by-tick realized correlations," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 54(11), pages 2372-2382, November.
    27. Christensen, B. J. & Prabhala, N. R., 1998. "The relation between implied and realized volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(2), pages 125-150, November.
    28. Audrino, Francesco & Sigrist, Fabio & Ballinari, Daniele, 2020. "The impact of sentiment and attention measures on stock market volatility," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 334-357.
    29. Daniel W. Apley & Jingyu Zhu, 2020. "Visualizing the effects of predictor variables in black box supervised learning models," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 82(4), pages 1059-1086, September.
    30. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(2), pages 301-320, April.
    31. Peter Carr & Liuren Wu & Zhibai Zhang, 2019. "Using Machine Learning to Predict Realized Variance," Papers 1909.10035, arXiv.org.
    32. Massimiliano Caporin & Francesco Poli, 2017. "Building News Measures from Textual Data and an Application to Volatility Forecasting," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 5(3), pages 1-46, August.
    33. Engle, Robert F, 1982. "Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity with Estimates of the Variance of United Kingdom Inflation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 987-1007, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Machine Learning for Realized Volatility Forecasting
      by Francis Diebold in No Hesitations on 2021-02-01 12:16:00

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kaczmarek, Tomasz & Będowska-Sójka, Barbara & Grobelny, Przemysław & Perez, Katarzyna, 2022. "False Safe Haven Assets: Evidence From the Target Volatility Strategy Based on Recurrent Neural Network," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    2. Jiawen Luo & Oguzhan Cepni & Riza Demirer & Rangan Gupta, 2022. "Forecasting Multivariate Volatilities with Exogenous Predictors: An Application to Industry Diversification Strategies," Working Papers 202258, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    3. M. Shabani & M. Magris & George Tzagkarakis & J. Kanniainen & A. Iosifidis, 2023. "Predicting the state of synchronization of financial time series using cross recurrence plots," Post-Print hal-04415269, HAL.
    4. Zhu, Haibin & Bai, Lu & He, Lidan & Liu, Zhi, 2023. "Forecasting realized volatility with machine learning: Panel data perspective," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 251-271.
    5. Chao Zhang & Yihuang Zhang & Mihai Cucuringu & Zhongmin Qian, 2022. "Volatility forecasting with machine learning and intraday commonality," Papers 2202.08962, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2023.
    6. Rafael Reisenhofer & Xandro Bayer & Nikolaus Hautsch, 2022. "HARNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for Realized Volatility Forecasting," Papers 2205.07719, arXiv.org.
    7. Borup, Daniel & Rapach, David E. & Schütte, Erik Christian Montes, 2023. "Mixed-frequency machine learning: Nowcasting and backcasting weekly initial claims with daily internet search volume data," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 1122-1144.
    8. Timothé Gronier & William Maréchal & Christophe Geissler & Stéphane Gibout, 2022. "Usage of GAMS-Based Digital Twins and Clustering to Improve Energetic Systems Control," Energies, MDPI, vol. 16(1), pages 1-17, December.
    9. Robert Stok & Paul Bilokon, 2023. "From Deep Filtering to Deep Econometrics," Papers 2311.06256, arXiv.org.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zhu, Haibin & Bai, Lu & He, Lidan & Liu, Zhi, 2023. "Forecasting realized volatility with machine learning: Panel data perspective," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 251-271.
    2. Chun, Dohyun & Cho, Hoon & Ryu, Doojin, 2023. "Discovering the drivers of stock market volatility in a data-rich world," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    3. Petropoulos, Fotios & Apiletti, Daniele & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios & Babai, Mohamed Zied & Barrow, Devon K. & Ben Taieb, Souhaib & Bergmeir, Christoph & Bessa, Ricardo J. & Bijak, Jakub & Boylan, Joh, 2022. "Forecasting: theory and practice," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 705-871.
      • Fotios Petropoulos & Daniele Apiletti & Vassilios Assimakopoulos & Mohamed Zied Babai & Devon K. Barrow & Souhaib Ben Taieb & Christoph Bergmeir & Ricardo J. Bessa & Jakub Bijak & John E. Boylan & Jet, 2020. "Forecasting: theory and practice," Papers 2012.03854, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2022.
    4. Chao Zhang & Yihuang Zhang & Mihai Cucuringu & Zhongmin Qian, 2022. "Volatility forecasting with machine learning and intraday commonality," Papers 2202.08962, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2023.
    5. Xue Gong & Weiguo Zhang & Yuan Zhao & Xin Ye, 2023. "Forecasting stock volatility with a large set of predictors: A new forecast combination method," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(7), pages 1622-1647, November.
    6. Byounghyun Jeon & Sung Won Seo & Jun Sik Kim, 2020. "Uncertainty and the volatility forecasting power of option‐implied volatility," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(7), pages 1109-1126, July.
    7. Cheng, Mingmian & Swanson, Norman R. & Yang, Xiye, 2021. "Forecasting volatility using double shrinkage methods," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 46-61.
    8. Audrino, Francesco & Sigrist, Fabio & Ballinari, Daniele, 2020. "The impact of sentiment and attention measures on stock market volatility," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 334-357.
    9. Wilms, Ines & Rombouts, Jeroen & Croux, Christophe, 2021. "Multivariate volatility forecasts for stock market indices," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 484-499.
    10. Tomáš Plíhal, 2021. "Scheduled macroeconomic news announcements and Forex volatility forecasting," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(8), pages 1379-1397, December.
    11. Ricardo P. Masini & Marcelo C. Medeiros & Eduardo F. Mendes, 2023. "Machine learning advances for time series forecasting," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(1), pages 76-111, February.
    12. Gong, Xue & Ye, Xin & Zhang, Weiguo & Zhang, Yue, 2023. "Predicting energy futures high-frequency volatility using technical indicators: The role of interaction," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).
    13. Kaminska, Iryna & Roberts-Sklar, Matt, 2018. "Volatility in equity markets and monetary policy rate uncertainty," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 68-83.
    14. Degiannakis, Stavros & Filis, George & Hassani, Hossein, 2018. "Forecasting global stock market implied volatility indices," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 111-129.
    15. Yao, Xingzhi & Izzeldin, Marwan & Li, Zhenxiong, 2019. "A novel cluster HAR-type model for forecasting realized volatility," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1318-1331.
    16. Chen, Wang & Lu, Xinjie & Wang, Jiqian, 2022. "Modeling and managing stock market volatility using MRS-MIDAS model," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 625-635.
    17. Ma, Feng & Li, Yu & Liu, Li & Zhang, Yaojie, 2018. "Are low-frequency data really uninformative? A forecasting combination perspective," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 92-108.
    18. Wang Pu & Yixiang Chen & Feng Ma, 2016. "Forecasting the realized volatility in the Chinese stock market: further evidence," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(33), pages 3116-3130, July.
    19. Andrew J. Patton & Yasin Simsek, 2023. "Generalized Autoregressive Score Trees and Forests," Papers 2305.18991, arXiv.org.
    20. Lyócsa, Štefan & Molnár, Peter & Výrost, Tomáš, 2021. "Stock market volatility forecasting: Do we need high-frequency data?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 1092-1110.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Gradient boosting; high-frequency data; machine learning; neural network; random forest; realized variance; regularization; volatility forecasting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C10 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - General
    • C50 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aah:create:2021-03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.econ.au.dk/afn/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.