Learning volatility-adaptive forgetting via GARCH-modulated LSTM for stock price forecasting

Abstract

Stock price forecasting is hindered by the heteroscedastic nature of financial time series, in which turbulent and tranquil regimes alternate. Although the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is widely used for this task, its gates are oblivious to such volatility variation, so memory retention remains fixed regardless of market conditions. A common remedy is to supply volatility estimates as an additional input feature, yet this leaves the internal memory dynamics untouched. Instead, volatility can serve as a direct regulatory signal over the gate activation itself. This paper presents the Gsigmoid-LSTM model, which embeds Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH(1,1))-derived volatility estimates into the LSTM forgetting gate through the Gsigmoid activation function, a volatility-adaptive variant of the sigmoid that combines a volatility adjustment factor with slope regulation via a learnable parameter. The model thereby automatically prioritizes recent information during turbulent periods while preserving long-term dependencies in stable markets. In the engineering application of daily stock price forecasting, extensive experiments, including activation function comparisons, baseline evaluations, and ablation studies, demonstrate that this structural gating modification effectively improves forecasting accuracy and robustness. The proposed model significantly outperforms a feature-level fusion baseline carrying the same volatility signal on all five datasets, as confirmed by Diebold-Mariano tests with all p<0.01, attains the best average rank of 1.00 in the Friedman test across nine models, and achieves the lowest MSE and MAE on all five datasets.