Long-Horizon Forecasting of Complete Financial Statements with Forma
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Abstract (arXiv)
Specialist training beats generalist scale when forecasting financial statements. To our knowledge, no prior work jointly forecasts complete financial statements beyond one year, yet in a discounted-cash-flow valuation most firm value sits past that window. We release ProForma-20Q, a reproducible benchmark for forecasting 78 statement line items 1-20 quarters ahead, for anonymized firms, from past statements and an industry code, scored by change-space R2. On it, Forma, a transformer that reads statements as sets of (account, quarter, value) tuples and maximizes a masked-tuple Gaussian likelihood, beats every competitor we field: classical machine learning, chained gradient boosting, a zero-shot time-series foundation model, and frontier large language models. Its lead widens with horizon, where valuation needs accuracy most, and its Gaussian predictive intervals never under-cover. Forma's forecasts nearly satisfy accounting identities; exact coherence is recoverable at no statistically significant accuracy cost. Its tuple interface supports scenario analysis without retraining, and we show that pinning future revenue paths sharpens the rest of the statement.
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References · 10
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
- 2022Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting?cited by 1,424
- 2023A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecastingcited by 692
- 2023Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasterscited by 500
- 2025Chronos-2: From Univariate to Universal Forecastingcited by 194
- 2024Are Language Models Actually Useful for Time Series Forecasting?cited by 168
- 2022On the Pitfalls of Heteroscedastic Uncertainty Estimation with Probabilistic Neural Networkscited by 120
- 2020Uncertainty-Aware Lookahead Factor Models for Quantitative Investingcited by 8
- 2017Improving Factor-Based Quantitative Investing by Forecasting Company Fundamentalscited by 5
- 2023Point and probabilistic forecast reconciliation for general linearly constrained multiple time seriescited by 5
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