Growing the Efficient Frontier on Panel Trees

We introduce a new class of tree-based models, P-Trees, for analyzing (unbalanced) panel of individual asset returns, generalizing high-dimensional sorting with economic guidance and interpretability. Under the mean-variance efficient framework, P-Trees construct test assets that significantly advance the efficient frontier compared to commonly used test assets, with alphas unexplained by benchmark pricing models. P-Tree tangency portfolios also constitute traded factors, recovering the pricing kernel and outperforming popular observable and latent factor models for investments and cross-sectional pricing. Finally, P-Trees capture the complexity of asset returns with sparsity, achieving out-of-sample Sharpe ratios close to those attained only by over-parameterized large models.

Deep Sequence Modeling: Development and Applications in Asset Pricing

We predict asset returns and measure risk premia using a prominent technique from artificial intelligence -- deep sequence modeling. Because asset returns often exhibit sequential dependence that may not be effectively captured by conventional time series models, sequence modeling offers a promising path with its data-driven approach and superior performance. In this paper, we first overview the development of deep sequence models, introduce their applications in asset pricing, and discuss their advantages and limitations. We then perform a comparative analysis of these methods using data on U.S. equities. We demonstrate how sequence modeling benefits investors in general through incorporating complex historical path dependence, and that Long- and Short-term Memory (LSTM) based models tend to have the best out-of-sample performance.