# WaVeFuse: Regime-Adaptive Equity Index Forecasting via Channel-Wise Wavelet Denoising and Vertical Attention Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14733 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14733/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Applications of deep learning in stock market prediction: recent progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01859/) (2020)
- [A Comparative Analysis of Forecasting Financial Time Series Using ARIMA, LSTM, and BiLSTM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09512/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DSTNet: Dynamic Spectral Trajectory Network for Causal Multi-Horizon Financial Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09654/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hybrid Deep Learning for equity index forecasting is limited by three problems: propagation of OHLCV noise into derived technical indicators (TIs), channel-indiscriminate multi-scale decomposition that conflates heterogeneous frequency signatures, and static multi-branch fusion that cannot adapt to market regime shifts. WaVeFuse addresses these limitations through a unified dual-branch architecture. Symlet-4 wavelet denoising (level 2, MAD soft threshold) suppresses microstructure noise in OHLCV. Seven low-lag TIs computed from denoised prices are encoded by a causal channel-wise continuous wavelet transform (Morlet, 32 scales) into a per-timestep scale-space matrix. A CNN-BiLSTM branch captures temporal dynamics, while a dual-layer Transformer (heads=4, dk in {16, 32}) models inter-scale spectral dependencies, and their representations are integrated by a 2-token softmax gate Vertical Attention Fusion (VAF) that dynamically reweights branches as market regimes shift. Evaluated under walk-forward validation (WFV) on KOSPI, DAX, NYSE Composite, and Russell 2000 (2010-2023), WaVeFuse achieves R2 = 0.81-0.96 and directional accuracy 70.5-78.3%. It outperforms seven state-of-the-art models by 8.9-20.2% MAE across twelve dataset-period configurations. Diebold-Mariano statistics (4.62-10.38, p<0.001) confirm superiority over a well-tuned XGBoost benchmark across four indices. Ablation verifies component-wise contributions. Under realistic backtesting with 10 basis point transaction costs, WaVeFuse's directional strategy achieves a mean Sharpe ratio of 3.69 across four markets and limits maximum drawdown to 7.5% during the COVID-19 crash. With 152k parameters (0.68MB) and sub-1.3ms GPU inference, WaVeFuse delivers a computationally efficient, regime-robust framework suitable for research and decision-support deployment.