Headline-Driven Classification and Local Interpretation for Market Outperformance and Low-Risk Stock Prediction

Financial news is one of the most influential sources for making long-term investment decisions. The goal of this paper is to learn whether it is possible, based on texts from news headlines, to select stocks with low forecasted volatility which outrun the market represented by the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index. We solve several binary classification problems using a range of machine learning and deep learning principles. The best classifiers are interpreted with a model-agnostic technique, LIME, to extract key words having the greatest impact on the probabilities of market outrun and low volatility.