A Distillation-based Future-aware Graph Neural Network for Stock Trend Prediction

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A Distillation-based Future-aware Graph Neural Network for Stock Trend Prediction

Zhipeng Liu
Peibo Duan
Mingyang Geng
Bin Zhang
Published on 2/15/2025
Equities
Stocks
Machine learning
Deep learning
Stock picking
Momentum in stocks

The paper proposes DisFT-GNN, a novel distillation-based framework for stock trend prediction that addresses the limitation of existing GNN methods which only rely on historical spatiotemporal dependencies. The key innovation is a teacher model that learns to capture correlations between historical and future data distributions using an attention-based multi-channel fusion mechanism. This teacher generates future-aware spatiotemporal representations, which are then used as intermediate supervision to train a student model via HSIC-based distillation loss. The student model learns to infer future patterns solely from historical data, enabling more accurate predictions without future information leakage during inference. Extensive experiments on S&P 100 and NASDAQ 100 datasets demonstrate that DisFT-GNN significantly outperforms seven state-of-the-art GNN baselines, achieving up to 5.41% improvement in accuracy and substantial gains in MCC. Back-testing simulations further confirm the practical profitability of the approach. The framework is model-agnostic and can be integrated with any GNN-based stock predictor, making it a versatile enhancement for financial forecasting.

Highlights

  • 1Proposes a distillation-based future-aware GNN framework (DisFT-GNN) that captures correlations between historical and future data distributions for stock trend prediction.
  • 2Introduces a teacher model with attention-based multi-channel feature fusion to model diverse historical-future distribution shifts.
  • 3Uses future-aware representations from the teacher as intermediate supervision to guide the student model via HSIC-based distillation loss.
  • 4Achieves state-of-the-art performance on S&P 100 and NASDAQ 100 datasets, with average accuracy improvement up to 5.41% over baselines.
  • 5Demonstrates consistent profitability improvement in back-testing simulations.

Methods

  • M
    Spatiotemporal GNN module for encoding historical stock data and relational dependencies.
  • M
    Attention-based multi-channel feature fusion combining historical spatiotemporal embeddings with future trend embeddings.
  • M
    Knowledge distillation using Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to transfer future-aware representations from teacher to student model.
  • M
    Binary classification with cross-entropy loss for stock trend prediction (up/down).

Results

  • R
    DisFT-GNN improves accuracy by 2-5.41% and MCC by 82.3-218% over seven baseline GNN models on two datasets.
  • R
    Back-testing shows cumulative profit gap between DisFT-GNN and baseline widens over time, indicating better investment returns.
  • R
    Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both the future-aware teacher and the distillation mechanism.
  • R
    The framework is model-agnostic and consistently boosts performance when integrated with various GNN backbones.
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