EMAT: Enhanced Multi-Aspect Attention Transformer for Financial Time Series Forecasting

Abstract

Financial time series prediction remains a challenging task due to the inherent non-stationarity, noise, and complex temporal dependencies present in market data. Traditional forecasting methods often fail to capture the multifaceted nature of financial markets, where temporal proximity, trend dynamics, and volatility patterns simultaneously influence price movements. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the Enhanced Multi-Aspect Transformer (EMAT), a novel deep learning architecture specifically designed for stock market prediction. EMAT incorporates a Multi-Aspect Attention Mechanism that simultaneously captures temporal decay patterns, trend dynamics, and volatility regimes through specialized attention components. The model employs an encoder–decoder architecture with enhanced feed-forward networks utilizing SwiGLU activation, enabling superior modeling of complex non-linear relationships. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive multi-objective loss function that balances point-wise prediction accuracy with volatility consistency. Extensive experiments on multiple stock market datasets demonstrate that EMAT consistently outperforms a wide range of state-of-the-art baseline models, including various recurrent, hybrid, and Transformer architectures. Our ablation studies further validate the design, confirming that each component of the Multi-Aspect Attention Mechanism makes a critical and quantifiable contribution to the model’s predictive power. The proposed architecture’s ability to simultaneously model these distinct financial characteristics makes it a particularly effective and robust tool for financial forecasting, offering significant improvements in accuracy compared to existing approaches.