Stock Price Volatility Prediction: A Case Study with AutoML

Abstract

Accurate prediction of stock price volatility, the rate at which the price of a stock increases or decreases over a particular period, is an important problem in finance. Inaccurate prediction of stock price volatility might lead to investment risk and financial loss, while accurate prediction might generate significant returns for investors. Several studies investigated stock price volatility prediction as a regression task using the transcripts of earnings calls (quarterly conference calls held by public companies) with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Existing studies use the entire transcript, which can degrade performance due to noise caused by irrelevant information that may not have a significant impact on stock price volatility. In order to overcome these limitations, by considering stock price volatility prediction as a classification task, we explore several denoising approaches, ranging from general-purpose approaches to techniques specific to finance to remove the noise, and leverage AutoML systems that enable auto-exploration of a wide variety of models. Our preliminary findings indicate that domain-specific denoising approaches provide better results than general-purpose approaches, while AutoML systems show promising results.