CapOptix: An Options-Framework for Capacity Market Pricing ArXiv ID: 2512.12871 “View on arXiv” Authors: Millend Roy, Agostino Capponi, Vladimir Pyltsov, Yinbo Hu, Vijay Modi Abstract Electricity markets are under increasing pressure to maintain reliability amidst rising renewable penetration, demand variability, and occasional price shocks. Traditional capacity market designs often fall short in addressing this by relying on expected-value metrics of energy unserved, which overlook risk exposure in such systems. In this work, we present CapOptix, a capacity pricing framework that interprets capacity commitments as reliability options, i.e., financial derivatives of wholesale electricity prices. CapOptix characterizes the capacity premia charged by accounting for structural price shifts modeled by the Markov Regime Switching Process. We apply the framework to historical price data from multiple electricity markets and compare the resulting premium ranges with existing capacity remuneration mechanisms. ...

Credit Risk Estimation with Non-Financial Features: Evidence from a Synthetic Istanbul Dataset ArXiv ID: 2512.12783 “View on arXiv” Authors: Atalay Denknalbant, Emre Sezdi, Zeki Furkan Kutlu, Polat Goktas Abstract Financial exclusion constrains entrepreneurship, increases income volatility, and widens wealth gaps. Underbanked consumers in Istanbul often have no bureau file because their earnings and payments flow through informal channels. To study how such borrowers can be evaluated we create a synthetic dataset of one hundred thousand Istanbul residents that reproduces first quarter 2025 TÜİK census marginals and telecom usage patterns. Retrieval augmented generation feeds these public statistics into the OpenAI o3 model, which synthesises realistic yet private records. Each profile contains seven socio demographic variables and nine alternative attributes that describe phone specifications, online shopping rhythm, subscription spend, car ownership, monthly rent, and a credit card flag. To test the impact of the alternative financial data CatBoost, LightGBM, and XGBoost are each trained in two versions. Demo models use only the socio demographic variables; Full models include both socio demographic and alternative attributes. Across five fold stratified validation the alternative block raises area under the curve by about one point three percentage and lifts balanced (F_{“1”}) from roughly 0.84 to 0.95, a fourteen percent gain. We contribute an open Istanbul 2025 Q1 synthetic dataset, a fully reproducible modeling pipeline, and empirical evidence that a concise set of behavioural attributes can approach bureau level discrimination power while serving borrowers who lack formal credit records. These findings give lenders and regulators a transparent blueprint for extending fair and safe credit access to the underbanked. ...

Empirical Mode Decomposition and Graph Transformation of the MSCI World Index: A Multiscale Topological Analysis for Graph Neural Network Modeling ArXiv ID: 2512.12526 “View on arXiv” Authors: Agustín M. de los Riscos, Julio E. Sandubete, Diego Carmona-Fernández, León Beleña Abstract This study applies Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to the MSCI World index and converts the resulting intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) into graph representations to enable modeling with graph neural networks (GNNs). Using CEEMDAN, we extract nine IMFs spanning high-frequency fluctuations to long-term trends. Each IMF is transformed into a graph using four time-series-to-graph methods: natural visibility, horizontal visibility, recurrence, and transition graphs. Topological analysis shows clear scale-dependent structure: high-frequency IMFs yield dense, highly connected small-world graphs, whereas low-frequency IMFs produce sparser networks with longer characteristic path lengths. Visibility-based methods are more sensitive to amplitude variability and typically generate higher clustering, while recurrence graphs better preserve temporal dependencies. These results provide guidance for designing GNN architectures tailored to the structural properties of decomposed components, supporting more effective predictive modeling of financial time series. ...

EXFormer: A Multi-Scale Trend-Aware Transformer with Dynamic Variable Selection for Foreign Exchange Returns Prediction ArXiv ID: 2512.12727 “View on arXiv” Authors: Dinggao Liu, Robert Ślepaczuk, Zhenpeng Tang Abstract Accurately forecasting daily exchange rate returns represents a longstanding challenge in international finance, as the exchange rate returns are driven by a multitude of correlated market factors and exhibit high-frequency fluctuations. This paper proposes EXFormer, a novel Transformer-based architecture specifically designed for forecasting the daily exchange rate returns. We introduce a multi-scale trend-aware self-attention mechanism that employs parallel convolutional branches with differing receptive fields to align observations on the basis of local slopes, preserving long-range dependencies while remaining sensitive to regime shifts. A dynamic variable selector assigns time-varying importance weights to 28 exogenous covariates related to exchange rate returns, providing pre-hoc interpretability. An embedded squeeze-and-excitation block recalibrates channel responses to emphasize informative features and depress noise in the forecasting. Using the daily data for EUR/USD, USD/JPY, and GBP/USD, we conduct out-of-sample evaluations across five different sliding windows. EXFormer consistently outperforms the random walk and other baselines, improving directional accuracy by a statistically significant margin of up to 8.5–22.8%. In nearly one year of trading backtests, the model converts these gains into cumulative returns of 18%, 25%, and 18% for the three pairs, with Sharpe ratios exceeding 1.8. When conservative transaction costs and slippage are accounted for, EXFormer retains cumulative returns of 7%, 19%, and 9%, while other baselines achieve negative. The robustness checks further confirm the model’s superiority under high-volatility and bear-market regimes. EXFormer furnishes both economically valuable forecasts and transparent, time-varying insights into the drivers of exchange rate dynamics for international investors, corporations, and central bank practitioners. ...

What’s the Price of Monotonicity? A Multi-Dataset Benchmark of Monotone-Constrained Gradient Boosting for Credit PD ArXiv ID: 2512.17945 “View on arXiv” Authors: Petr Koklev Abstract Financial institutions face a trade-off between predictive accuracy and interpretability when deploying machine learning models for credit risk. Monotonicity constraints align model behavior with domain knowledge, but their performance cost - the price of monotonicity - is not well quantified. This paper benchmarks monotone-constrained versus unconstrained gradient boosting models for credit probability of default across five public datasets and three libraries. We define the Price of Monotonicity (PoM) as the relative change in standard performance metrics when moving from unconstrained to constrained models, estimated via paired comparisons with bootstrap uncertainty. In our experiments, PoM in AUC ranges from essentially zero to about 2.9 percent: constraints are almost costless on large datasets (typically less than 0.2 percent, often indistinguishable from zero) and most costly on smaller datasets with extensive constraint coverage (around 2-3 percent). Thus, appropriately specified monotonicity constraints can often deliver interpretability with small accuracy losses, particularly in large-scale credit portfolios. ...

Deep Hedging with Reinforcement Learning: A Practical Framework for Option Risk Management ArXiv ID: 2512.12420 “View on arXiv” Authors: Travon Lucius, Christian Koch, Jacob Starling, Julia Zhu, Miguel Urena, Carrie Hu Abstract We present a reinforcement-learning (RL) framework for dynamic hedging of equity index option exposures under realistic transaction costs and position limits. We hedge a normalized option-implied equity exposure (one unit of underlying delta, offset via SPY) by trading the underlying index ETF, using the option surface and macro variables only as state information and not as a direct pricing engine. Building on the “deep hedging” paradigm of Buehler et al. (2019), we design a leak-free environment, a cost-aware reward function, and a lightweight stochastic actor-critic agent trained on daily end-of-day panel data constructed from SPX/SPY implied volatility term structure, skew, realized volatility, and macro rate context. On a fixed train/validation/test split, the learned policy improves risk-adjusted performance versus no-hedge, momentum, and volatility-targeting baselines (higher point-estimate Sharpe); only the GAE policy’s test-sample Sharpe is statistically distinguishable from zero, although confidence intervals overlap with a long-SPY benchmark so we stop short of claiming formal dominance. Turnover remains controlled and the policy is robust to doubled transaction costs. The modular codebase, comprising a data pipeline, simulator, and training scripts, is engineered for extensibility to multi-asset overlays, alternative objectives (e.g., drawdown or CVaR), and intraday data. From a portfolio management perspective, the learned overlay is designed to sit on top of an existing SPX or SPY allocation, improving the portfolio’s mean-variance trade-off with controlled turnover and drawdowns. We discuss practical implications for portfolio overlays and outline avenues for future work. ...

Explainable Prediction of Economic Time Series Using IMFs and Neural Networks ArXiv ID: 2512.12499 “View on arXiv” Authors: Pablo Hidalgo, Julio E. Sandubete, Agustín García-García Abstract This study investigates the contribution of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) derived from economic time series to the predictive performance of neural network models, specifically Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. To enhance interpretability, DeepSHAP is applied, which estimates the marginal contribution of each IMF while keeping the rest of the series intact. Results show that the last IMFs, representing long-term trends, are generally the most influential according to DeepSHAP, whereas high-frequency IMFs contribute less and may even introduce noise, as evidenced by improved metrics upon their removal. Differences between MLP and LSTM highlight the effect of model architecture on feature relevance distribution, with LSTM allocating importance more evenly across IMFs. ...

Extending the application of dynamic Bayesian networks in calculating market risk: Standard and stressed expected shortfall ArXiv ID: 2512.12334 “View on arXiv” Authors: Eden Gross, Ryan Kruger, Francois Toerien Abstract In the last five years, expected shortfall (ES) and stressed ES (SES) have become key required regulatory measures of market risk in the banking sector, especially following events such as the global financial crisis. Thus, finding ways to optimize their estimation is of great importance. We extend the application of dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) to the estimation of 10-day 97.5% ES and stressed ES, building on prior work applying DBNs to value at risk. Using the S&P 500 index as a proxy for the equities trading desk of a US bank, we compare the performance of three DBN structure-learning algorithms with several traditional market risk models, using either the normal or the skewed Student’s t return distributions. Backtesting shows that all models fail to produce statistically accurate ES and SES forecasts at the 2.5% level, reflecting the difficulty of modeling extreme tail behavior. For ES, the EGARCH(1,1) model (normal) produces the most accurate forecasts, while, for SES, the GARCH(1,1) model (normal) performs best. All distribution-dependent models deteriorate substantially when using the skewed Student’s t distribution. The DBNs perform comparably to the historical simulation model, but their contribution to tail prediction is limited by the small weight assigned to their one-day-ahead forecasts within the return distribution. Future research should examine weighting schemes that enhance the influence of forward-looking DBN forecasts on tail risk estimation. ...

Stochastic Volatility Modelling with LSTM Networks: A Hybrid Approach for S&P 500 Index Volatility Forecasting ArXiv ID: 2512.12250 “View on arXiv” Authors: Anna Perekhodko, Robert Ślepaczuk Abstract Accurate volatility forecasting is essential in banking, investment, and risk management, because expectations about future market movements directly influence current decisions. This study proposes a hybrid modelling framework that integrates a Stochastic Volatility model with a Long Short Term Memory neural network. The SV model improves statistical precision and captures latent volatility dynamics, especially in response to unforeseen events, while the LSTM network enhances the model’s ability to detect complex nonlinear patterns in financial time series. The forecasting is conducted using daily data from the S and P 500 index, covering the period from January 1 1998 to December 31 2024. A rolling window approach is employed to train the model and generate one step ahead volatility forecasts. The performance of the hybrid SV-LSTM model is evaluated through both statistical testing and investment simulations. The results show that the hybrid approach outperforms both the standalone SV and LSTM models and contributes to the development of volatility modelling techniques, providing a foundation for improving risk assessment and strategic investment planning in the context of the S and P 500. ...

Generative AI for Analysts ArXiv ID: 2512.19705 “View on arXiv” Authors: Jian Xue, Qian Zhang, Wu Zhu Abstract We study how generative artificial intelligence (AI) transforms the work of financial analysts. Using the 2023 launch of FactSet’s AI platform as a natural experiment, we find that adoption produces markedly richer and more comprehensive reports – featuring 40% more distinct information sources, 34% broader topical coverage, and 25% greater use of advanced analytical methods – while also improving timeliness. However, forecast errors rise by 59% as AI-assisted reports convey a more balanced mix of positive and negative information that is harder to synthesize, particularly for analysts facing heavier cognitive demands. Placebo tests using other data vendors confirm that these effects are unique to FactSet’s AI integration. Overall, our findings reveal both the productivity gains and cognitive limits of generative AI in financial information production. ...