A long-short dual-mode knowledge distillation framework for empirical asset pricing models in digital financial networks

The continuous combination of digital network technology and traditional financial services has given birth to digital financial networks, which explore massive economic data under the AI-driven models to achieve intelligent connections among financial institutions, markets, transactions, and instruments. Empirical asset pricing is a challenging task in financial analysis, which has attracted research attention. However, existing studies only focus on tackling the challenges of equity risk premium in the single stock market. Considering multiple economic linkages between the two countries, the transaction history of the US stock market as empirical knowledge is a powerful supplement to improve the prediction of equity risk premium in the China market. In this paper, we aim to fully leverage the prior information in two stock markets for empirical asset pricing models. Due to the rich financial domain knowledge, there may be various characteristic signals that partially overlap in different periods. To address these issues, we propose a framework based on long-short dual-mode knowledge distillation, termed as LSDM-KD, which incorporates US and China stock market models, and a shared characteristic signals model. The method effectively understands the relationships between assets and market behaviour, reducing reliance on expensive correlation databases and professional knowledge. Extensive experiments conducted on US and China stock market datasets demonstrate that our LSDM-KD can significantly improve the performance of empirical asset pricing.