Signal Simplification Is Not Predictive Simplification: Diagnosing Residual Neural Forecasting in Short-Horizon Volatility

Bingqi Lian, Linfeng Cheng, Mei Lu, Jerry Wu

Hybrid statistical-neural pipelines often assume that a successful statistical first stage leaves a cleaner and more learnable residual target. We examine that assumption in short-horizon volatility forecasting through a signal-forecast-system diagnostic framework. Across five liquid U.S. assets, a volatility-aligned HAR-style model outperforms AR, MA, and ARIMA. Within expanding training windows, the pre-standardization fitted residual process used to construct residual-LSTM sequences has about 82% lower variance than the corresponding target and near-zero lag-1 autocorrelation; independently, rolling pseudo-out-of-sample HAR errors show about 74% variance reduction and similarly weak lag-1 dependence. Residual-only LSTM augmentation nevertheless raises mean squared error from 0.3049 to 0.3594 on average, with deterioration on every asset. Pure LSTM records the lowest selected pseudo-out-of-sample MSE, 0.2649, while the residual hybrid requires substantially more end-to-end runtime without improving accuracy. We describe this pattern as forecaster-preconditioner asymmetry: first-stage forecasting success and statistical residual simplification need not translate into useful…