Trade When Opportunity Comes: Price Movement Forecasting via Locality-Aware Attention and Adaptive Refined Labeling

Price movement forecasting aims at predicting the future trends of financial assets based on the current market conditions and other relevant information. Recently, machine learning(ML) methods have become increasingly popular and achieved promising results for price movement forecasting in both academia and industry. Most existing ML solutions formulate the forecasting problem as a classification(to predict the direction) or a regression(to predict the return) problem in the entire set of training data. However, due to the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio and stochastic nature of financial data, good trading opportunities are extremely scarce. As a result, without careful selection of potentially profitable samples, such ML methods are prone to capture the patterns of noises instead of real signals. To address the above issues, we propose a novel framework-LARA(Locality-Aware Attention and Adaptive Refined Labeling), which contains the following three components: 1)Locality-aware attention automatically extracts the potentially profitable samples by attending to their label information in order to construct a more accurate classifier on these selected samples. 2)Adaptive refined labeling further iteratively refines the labels, alleviating the noise of samples. 3)Equipped with metric learning techniques, Locality-aware attention enjoys task-specific distance metrics and distributes attention on potentially profitable samples in a more effective way. To validate our method, we conduct comprehensive experiments on three real-world financial markets: ETFs, the China's A-share stock market, and the cryptocurrency market. LARA achieves superior performance compared with the time-series analysis methods and a set of machine learning based competitors on the Qlib platform. Extensive ablation studies and experiments demonstrate that LARA indeed captures more reliable trading opportunities.