English

Neural MJD: Neural Non-Stationary Merton Jump Diffusion for Time Series Prediction

Machine Learning 2026-02-10 v2

Abstract

While deep learning methods have achieved strong performance in time series prediction, their black-box nature and inability to explicitly model underlying stochastic processes often limit their generalization to non-stationary data, especially in the presence of abrupt changes. In this work, we introduce Neural MJD, a neural network based non-stationary Merton jump diffusion (MJD) model. Our model explicitly formulates forecasting as a stochastic differential equation (SDE) simulation problem, combining a time-inhomogeneous It\^o diffusion to capture non-stationary stochastic dynamics with a time-inhomogeneous compound Poisson process to model abrupt jumps. To enable tractable learning, we introduce a likelihood truncation mechanism that caps the number of jumps within small time intervals and provide a theoretical error bound for this approximation. Additionally, we propose an Euler-Maruyama with restart solver, which achieves a provably lower error bound in estimating expected states and reduced variance compared to the standard solver. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that Neural MJD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning and statistical learning methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.04542,
  title  = {Neural MJD: Neural Non-Stationary Merton Jump Diffusion for Time Series Prediction},
  author = {Yuanpei Gao and Qi Yan and Yan Leng and Renjie Liao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.04542},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at NeurIPS 2025