Relational Stock Selection via Probabilistic State Space Learning

Optimizing stock selection through stock ranking is one of the critical but intricate tasks in quantitative trading areas because of the non-stationary dynamics and complicated interdependencies behind stock markets. Recent studies have made efforts to model historical market movements to enhance stock selection. However, they primarily borrowed the spirit of time series modeling and sought to build a deterministic paradigm without considering the uncertain fluctuations. In addition, some of these studies tailor to explore stock correlations from a predefined (e.g., binary) graph structure and use explicitly simple relations (such as first-order relations) to guide evolving interactions. Nevertheless, aggregating predefined but shallow relationships to collaborate with stock movements may affect selection generalizability and increase the risk of portfolio failure. This study introduces a novel Relational stock selection framework via probabilistic State Space Learning (or RSSL) for stock selection. Specifically, RSSL first attempts to build a tree-based structure to explicitly expose higher-order relations in the stock market, primarily by discovering a hierarchical delineation of ties between stocks. Whereafter, it couples with time-varying movements via an attention mechanism to smoothly explore the interactive correlations among different stocks. Inspired by recent state space models (SSM) in probabilistic Bayesian learning, we devise a Probabilistic Kalman Network (PKNet) with uncertainty estimates to recursively simulate ever-changing stock volatility, enabling more promising return-risk trade-offs. The experimental results on several real-world stock market datasets demonstrate that RSSL outperforms several representative baseline methods by a significant margin.