Interpretable Factor Decomposition for Decision Intelligence in Large-Scale Financial Markets: Evidence from China's A-Share Market

Abstract

We present an interpretable machine learning pipeline to decompose cross-sectional equity return predictability into auditable factor contributions. We apply an XGBoost model with TreeSHAP attribution and conduct stress testing on 3,632 Chinese A-share stocks from 2009 until 2019. On prediction, using 60-month rolling windows over 55 months of out-of-sample data, XGBoost obtains a mean AUC of 0.547 (rank IC = 0.119) and +2.38%/month (Newey-West t = 5.94; annualized Sharpe 2.23) long-short spread for the top vs bottom quintiles. This alpha is persistent after adjusting for the Carhart four-factor model (+2.31%/month; t = 7.48). On interpretation, SHAP decomposition indicates that behavioral signals (turnover and momentum) account for 58.2% of predictive attribution compared to 10.7% for valuation ratios, on average, across 50 industry groups. Ablation analysis serves to cross-validate this ranking and provides evidence that SHAP and ablation diverge in a manner that highlights feature substitutability structure that is largely invisible to either method used in isolation.