Graph-Based Stock Volatility Forecasting with Effective Transfer Entropy and Hurst-Based Regime Adaptation

This study proposes a novel hybrid model for stock volatility forecasting by integrating directional and temporal dependencies among financial time series and market regime changes into a unified modeling framework. Specifically, we design a novel Hurst Exponent Effective Transfer Entropy Graph Neural Network (H-ETE-GNN) model that captures directional and asymmetric interactions based on Effective Transfer Entropy (ETE), and incorporates regime change detection using the Hurst exponent to reflect evolving global market conditions. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we compared the forecast performance of the hybrid GNN model with GNN models constructed using Transfer Entropy (TE), Granger causality, and Pearson correlation—each representing different measures of causality and correlation among time series. The empirical analysis was based on daily price data of 10 major country-level ETFs over a 19-year period (2006–2024), collected via Yahoo Finance. Additionally, we implemented recurrent neural network (RNN)-based models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) under the same experimental conditions to evaluate their performance relative to the GNN-based models. The effect of incorporating regime changes was further examined by comparing the model performance with and without Hurst-exponent-based detection. The experimental results demonstrated that the hybrid GNN-based approach effectively captured the structure of information flow between time series, leading to substantial improvements in the forecast performance for one-day-ahead realized volatility. Furthermore, incorporating regime change detection via the Hurst exponent enhanced the model’s adaptability to structural shifts in the market. This study highlights the potential of H-ETE-GNN in jointly modeling interactions between time series and market regimes, offering a promising direction for more accurate and robust volatility forecasting in complex financial environments.