4位量化在金融时序预测中表现依赖校准方法,校准不当会损失超一半预测能力。
Calibration Bets on the Past: Post-Training Quantization for Financial Time-Series Forecasting

- 用历史数据校准激活值范围,影响4位量化性能
- 4位全量化使信息系数下降11%-62%,部分可恢复
- 不同市场时期需动态调整校准策略,适合量化部署研究者
金融预测模型通常以全精度训练,但生产部署常需低精度推理以降低内存与计算开销。后训练量化(PTQ)可在不重新训练的情况下实现此目标。然而,可靠的激活量化依赖校准:激活范围需从历史数据中估计,并在部署后固定不变。该部署选择对金融预测的影响尚不明确。本文系统研究了在标普500跨截面波动率预测中激活校准对PTQ的影响。评估覆盖七种代表性神经网络架构、八轮滚动测试年份(2018–2025)及560个训练模型。结果表明,8位量化下校准影响较小,但在4位量化时成为决定预测性能的关键因素。默认绝对最大值(abs-max)校准下,权重与激活均4位量化使部分架构的全精度均信息系数下降11%–62%。改用分位数校准可恢复其中四个受影响最严重架构53%–94%的性能损失。最优激活范围随市场周期变化:窄范围在常规市况下提升分辨率,但当测试期市场离散度超过校准历史时优势减弱。研究显示,激活校准是金融预测中4位PTQ的首要部署决策。若仍存在显著退化,8位激活或仅权重4位量化是更稳健的选择。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Financial forecasting models are typically developed in full precision, yet production deployment often requires low-precision inference to reduce memory and computational cost. Post-training quantization (PTQ) enables such deployment without retraining. However, reliable activation quantization requires calibration: activation ranges are estimated from historical data before deployment and then remain fixed during future inference. The importance of this deployment choice for financial forecasting remains poorly understood. We present a systematic study of activation calibration for PTQ in cross-sectional volatility forecasting on the S&P 500. Our evaluation covers seven representative neural architectures, eight walk-forward test years (2018-2025), and 560 trained models. We find that activation calibration has little effect at 8 bits but becomes the primary determinant of predictive performance at 4 bits. Under default absolute-maximum (abs-max) calibration, static 4-bit quantization of both weights and activations removes 11-62% of the full-precision mean information coefficient in affected architectures. Replacing abs-max with percentile calibration recovers 53-94% of this degradation in the four most affected architectures. The preferred activation range also varies across market periods. Narrow ranges improve resolution under typical market conditions but lose part of their advantage when test-period market dispersion exceeds the calibration history. These findings show that activation calibration is a first-class deployment decision for reliable 4-bit PTQ in financial forecasting. When substantial degradation remains, 8-bit activations or weight-only 4-bit quantization provide more robust deployment choices.
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