An Extension of Laor Weight Initialization for Deep Time-Series Forecasting: Evidence from Thai Equity Risk Prediction

Abstract

This study presents a gradient-informed proxy initialization framework designed to improve training efficiency and predictive performance in deep learning models for time-series forecasting. The method extends the Laor Initialization approach by introducing backward gradient norm clustering as a selection criterion for input-layer weights, evaluated through a lightweight, architecture-agnostic proxy model. Only the numerical input layer adopts the selected initialization, while internal components retain standard schemes such as Xavier, Kaiming, or Orthogonal, maintaining compatibility and reducing overhead. The framework is evaluated on a real-world financial forecasting task: identifying high-risk equities from the Thai Market Surveillance Measure List, a domain characterized by label imbalance, non-stationarity, and limited data volume. Experiments across five architectures, including Transformer, ConvTran, and MMAGRU-FCN, show that the proposed strategy improves convergence speed and classification accuracy, particularly in deeper and hybrid models. Results in recurrent-based models are competitive but less pronounced. These findings support the method’s practical utility and generalizability for forecasting tasks under real-world constraints.