Corporate bond coupon prediction based on deep learning

Abstract

As the second largest bond market in the world, China's bond market has attracted extensive attention in recent years. Given its importance in facilitating financing arrangements and informing investment decisions, accurate bond coupon prediction is valuable. This paper proposes an ensemble model combining TabNet, DeepFM, and XGBoost for predicting the coupons of investment-grade corporate bonds. Specifically, to optimize the hyperparameters of the proposed model, an improved butterfly optimization algorithm incorporating the concepts of good point sets, refraction opposition-based learning, switching probability adjustment, and Solis & Wets search strategies is developed. Extensive experiments using data on China's investment-grade corporate bonds demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model in the accuracy of bond coupon predictions. Additionally, the importance of various features has been discussed. The results show that the base interest rate for valuation and term to maturity are important to bond coupon predictions obtained by the proposed model.