Neural Forecasting of the Italian Sovereign Bond Market with Economic News

In this paper, we employ economic news within a neural network framework to forecast the Italian 10-year interest rate spread. We use a big, open-source, database known as Global Database of Events, Language and Tone to extract topical and emotional news content linked to bond markets dynamics. We deploy such information within a probabilistic forecasting framework with autoregressive recurrent networks (DeepAR). Our findings suggest that a deep learning network based on long short-term memory cells outperforms classical machine learning techniques and provides a forecasting performance that is over and above that obtained by using conventional determinants of interest rates alone.