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.