Harnessing LLMs for Temporal Data - A Study on Explainable Financial Time Series Forecasting

Xinli Yu, Zheng Chen, Yanbin Lu


Abstract
Applying machine learning to financial time series has been an active area of industrial research enabling innovation in market insights, risk management, strategic decision-making, and policy formation. This paper explores the novel use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for explainable financial time series forecasting, addressing challenges in cross-sequence reasoning, multi-modal data integration, and result interpretation that are inherent in traditional approaches. Focusing on NASDAQ-100 stocks, we utilize public historical stock data, company metadata, and economic/financial news. Our experiments employ GPT-4 for zero-shot/few-shot inference and Open LLaMA for instruction-based fine-tuning. The study demonstrates LLMs’ ability to generate well-reasoned decisions by leveraging cross-sequence information and extracting insights from text and price time series. We show that our LLM-based approach outperforms classic ARMA-GARCH and gradient-boosting tree models. Furthermore, fine-tuned public LLMs, such as Open-LLaMA, can generate reasonable and explainable forecasts, although they underperform compared to GPT-4.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-industry.69
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Mingxuan Wang, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
739–753
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-industry.69
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-industry.69
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinli Yu, Zheng Chen, and Yanbin Lu. 2023. Harnessing LLMs for Temporal Data - A Study on Explainable Financial Time Series Forecasting. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 739–753, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Harnessing LLMs for Temporal Data - A Study on Explainable Financial Time Series Forecasting (Yu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-industry.69.pdf
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