COVID19-MLSF: A multi-task learning-based stock market forecasting framework during the COVID-19 pandemic

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has dramatically altered the state of the global economy, and the stock market has become more volatile and even fallen sharply as a result of its negative impact, heightening investors’ apprehension regarding the correlation between unexpected events and stock market volatility. Additionally, internal and external characteristics coexist in the stock market. Existing research has struggled to extract more effective stock market features during the COVID-19 outbreak using a single time-series neural network model. This paper presents a framework for multitasking learning-based stock market forecasting (COVID-19-MLSF), which can extract the internal and external features of the stock market and their relationships effectively during COVID-19.The innovation comprises three components: designing a new market sentiment index (NMSI) and COVID-19 index to represent the external characteristics of the stock market during the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides, it introduces a multi-task learning framework to extract global and local features of the stock market. Moreover, a temporal convolutional neural network with a multi-scale attention mechanism is designed (MA-TCN) alongside a Multi-View Convolutional-Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network with Temporal Attention (MVCNN-BiLSTM-Att), adjusting the model to account for the changing status of COVID-19 and its impact on the stock market. Experiments indicate that our model achieves superior performance both in terms of predicting the accuracy of the China CSI 300 Index during the COVID-19 period and in terms of sing market trading.