By: Sebastian Thomas Lynch, Stephen Lynch, Parisa Derakhshan
Forecasting stock prices remains a central challenge in financial modelling, as markets are influenced by market sentiment, firm-level fundamentals and complex interactions between macroeconomic and microeconomic factors, for example. This study evaluates the predictive performance of both classical statistical models and advanced attention-based deep learning architectures for daily stock price forecasting. Using a dataset of major U.S. equities and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) covering 2012–2024, we compare traditional statistical approaches, Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) and Exponential Smoothing (ES) in the Error, Trend, Seasonal (ETS) framework, with deep learning architectures such as the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT), and a novel hybrid model, the TFT-Graph Neural Network (TFT-GNN), which incorporates relational information between assets. All models are assessed under consistent experimental conditions in terms of forecast accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability. Our results indicate that while statistical models offer strong baselines with high stability and low computational cost, the TFT outperforms them in capturing short-term nonlinear dependencies. The hybrid TFT-GNN achieves the highest overall predictive accuracy, demonstrating that relational signals derived from inter-asset connections provide meaningful enhancements beyond traditional temporal and technical indicators. These findings highlight the advantages of integrating relational learning into temporal forecasting frameworks and emphasise the continued relevance of statistical models as interpretable and efficient benchmarks for evaluating deep learning approaches in high-frequency financial prediction.
