Characterizing financial markets from the event driven perspective

Abstract

In this work we study how company co-occurrence in news events can be used to discover business links between them. We develop a methodology that is able to process raw textual data, embed it into a numerical form, and extract a meaningful network of connections. Each news event is considered as a node on the graph and we define the similarity between the two events as the cosine similarity between their vectors in the embedded space. Using this procedure, we contribute to the literature by successfully reconstructing business links between companies, which is usually a difficult task since the data on this topic is either outdated, incomplete or not widely available. We then demonstrate possible uses of this network in two forecasting applications. First, we show how the network can be used as an exogenous feature vector, which improves the prediction of the correlation between companies in the network. This correlation is determined from their realized variance as well as using a wide set of machine learning models for prediction. Second, we demonstrate the use of network for predicting future events with point processes. Our methodology can be applied on any series of events, where we have demonstrated and evaluated its applicability on news events and large market moves. For most of the tested algorithms the experimental results show an improvement in performance when including information from our graphs. More specifically, in certain sectors using Neural Networks shows improved performance by up to 50%.