The Fama–French Five-Factor Model with Hurst Exponents Compared with Machine Learning Methods

Abstract

Scholars and investors have been interested in factor models for a long time. This paper builds models using the monthly data of the A-share market. We construct a seven-factor model by adding the Hurst exponent factor and the momentum factor to a Fama–French five-factor model and find that there is a 7% improvement in the average R–squared. Then, we compare five machine learning algorithms with ordinary least squares (OLS) in one representative stock and all A-Share stocks. We find that regularization algorithms, such as lasso and ridge, have worse performance than OLS. SVM and random forests have a good improvement in fitting power, while the neural network is not always better than OLS, depending on the data, frequency, period, etc.

Keywords

• Fama–French five-factor model
• Hurst exponent
• momentum factor
• machine learning