Volatility is the most forecastable quantity in finance — unlike returns, it clusters, mean-reverts, and leaves a measurable footprint in high-frequency data. This hub collects the modeling lineage from GARCH through realized volatility built on intraday data, to rough volatility and the modern deep-learning forecasters, along with VIX and variance-risk-premium research.
Because volatility forecasting has real benchmarks, rigor is easier to judge here than elsewhere: a serious paper compares against HAR-RV (the stubborn workhorse baseline) on out-of-sample data, not just against its own ablations. Watch also for the evaluation-loss trap — rankings of volatility models flip depending on whether you score them with MSE, QLIKE, or economic value in an options or risk-targeting strategy, and good papers say so explicitly.
Related hubs: Options & Derivatives, Risk Management, Machine Learning for Forecasting.
This paper shows a novel machine learning model for realized volatility (RV) prediction using a normalizing flow, an invertible neural network. Since RV is known to be skewed and have a fat tail, previous methods transform RV into values that follow a latent distribution with an explicit shape and t
Neural networks have revolutionized many empirical fields, yet their application to financial time series forecasting remains controversial. In this study, we demonstrate that the conventional practice of estimating models locally in data-scarce environments may underlie the mixed empirical performa
Mean-variance analysis is widely used in portfolio management to identify the best portfolio that makes an optimal trade-off between expected return and volatility. Yet, this method has its limitations, notably its vulnerability to estimation errors and its reliance on historical data. While shrinka
The energy transition has increased the reliance on intermittent energy sources, destabilizing energy markets and causing unprecedented volatility, culminating in the global energy crisis of 2021. In addition to harming producers and consumers, volatile energy markets may jeopardize vital decarboniz
We propose methods to improve the forecasts from generalized autoregressive score (GAS) models (Creal et. al, 2013; Harvey, 2013) by localizing their parameters using decision trees and random forests. These methods avoid the curse of dimensionality faced by kernel-based approaches, and allow one to
We test whether simple, interpretable state variables-trend and momentum-can generate durable out-of-sample alpha in one of the world’s most liquid assets, gold. Using a rolling 10-year training and 6-month testing walk-forward from 2015 to 2025 (2,793 trading days), we convert a smoothed trend-mome
Estimating time-varying correlation matrices is challenging because existing methods may adapt slowly to structural changes, impose insufficient regularization, or produce diffuse posterior uncertainty. In moderate dimensions, an additional difficulty is summarizing the estimated evolving dependence
We develop closed-form expansions for the implied volatility of VIX options within the class of forward variance models. Our approach builds on weak-approximation techniques for VIX option prices and yields explicit implied volatility expansions with computable correction terms. The resulting formul
We introduce the Local Occupied Volatility (LOV) model that sits between Dupire’s local volatility and fully path-dependent dynamics. By design, the LOV model ensures automatic calibration to European vanilla options, while offering the flexibility to capture stylized facts of volatility or fit addi
Generating synthetic financial time series that preserve the statistical properties of real market data is essential for stress testing, risk model validation, and scenario design. Existing approaches struggle to simultaneously reproduce heavy-tailed distributions, negligible linear autocorrelation,
Deep hedging trains neural networks to manage derivative risk under market frictions, but produces hedge ratios with no measure of model confidence – a significant barrier to deployment. We introduce uncertainty quantification to the deep hedging framework by training a deep ensemble of five indepe
We investigate whether cryptocurrency markets differentiate between infrastructure failures and regulatory enforcement at the return level, complementing a companion conditional variance analysis that finds 5.7 times larger volatility impacts from infrastructure events (p = 0.0008). Using event-leve
This paper introduces the Fractal-Chaotic Oscillation Co-driven (FCOC) framework, a novel paradigm for financial volatility forecasting that systematically resolves the dual challenges of feature fidelity and model responsiveness. FCOC synergizes two core innovations: our novel Fractal Feature Corre
We present the first deep-learning solver for backward stochastic Volterra integral equations (BSVIEs) and their fully-coupled forward-backward variants. The method trains a neural network to approximate the two solution fields in a single stage, avoiding the use of nested time-stepping cycles that
This study investigates enhancing option pricing by extending the Black-Scholes model to include stochastic volatility and interest rate variability within the Partial Differential Equation (PDE). The PDE is solved using the finite difference method. The extended Black-Scholes model and a machine le
Forecasting the volatility of financial assets is essential for various financial applications. This paper addresses the challenging task of forecasting the volatility of financial assets with limited historical data, such as new issues or spin-offs, by proposing a multi-source transfer learning app
We present a method based on optimal transport to remove arbitrage opportunities within a finite set of option prices. The method is notably intended for regulatory stress-tests, which require applying significant local distortions to implied volatility surfaces, thereby introducing arbitrage. The r
It is a market practice to express market-implied volatilities in some parametric form. The most popular parametrizations are based on or inspired by an underlying stochastic model, like the Heston model (SVI method) or the SABR model (SABR parametrization). Their popularity is often driven by a clo
This paper is devoted to the price-storage dynamics in natural gas markets. A novel stochastic path-dependent volatility model is introduced with path-dependence in both price volatility and storage increments. Model calibrations are conducted for both the price and storage dynamics. Further, we dis
The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (VIX) is calculated from SPX options and derivatives of VIX are also traded in market, which leads to the so-called ``consistent modeling" problem. This paper proposes a time-changed Lévy model for log price with a composite change of time structur