| ---
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| license: other
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| license_name: forma-nc-1.0
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| license_link: LICENSE.md
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| language:
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| - en
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| tags:
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| - finance
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| - accounting
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| - financial-statement-forecasting
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| - probabilistic-forecasting
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| - time-series-forecasting
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| - forma
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| - proforma-20q
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| pretty_name: "Forma — pro-forma financial statement forecaster"
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| extra_gated_prompt: >-
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| Released under the Forma Non-Commercial Research Licence v1.0 (see LICENSE.md).
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| Non-commercial academic research only; no redistribution; attribution required.
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| ALL COMMERCIAL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED to The University of Texas at Austin — for
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| commercial licensing, contact UT Discovery to Impact (ip@discoveries.utexas.edu).
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| No Compustat records are distributed and firm-level Compustat values cannot be
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| reconstructed from these weights, so no WRDS licence is required to download
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| them; reproducing the training or evaluation data does require your own.
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| extra_gated_fields:
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| Full name: text
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| Institution or affiliation: text
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| Email: text
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| I will use these files for non-commercial research only: checkbox
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| I will not redistribute these files: checkbox
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| Intended research use: text
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| extra_gated_auto_approve: true
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| extra_gated_button_content: "Accept licence and download"
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| ---
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|
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| # Forma — pro-forma financial statement forecaster
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| Forma jointly forecasts the complete quarterly financial statements of U.S.
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| public firms at horizons of 1–20 quarters, emitting a predictive distribution per
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| statement item.
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| This repository holds the **trained weights and the artifacts required to run or
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| score them**. The model *code* is separate and Apache-2.0:
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| [`forma-lab-mccombs/forma-release`](https://github.com/forma-lab-mccombs/forma-release).
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|
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| ## Contents
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| | file | what |
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| |---|---|
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| | `checkpoints/forma_fgrid_seed{60..64}.ckpt` | **Gaussian** β-NLL fleet, 5 seeds (11.4 MB each) — the squared-error / point track |
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| | `checkpoints/forma_lap05_fgrid_seed{60..64}.ckpt` | **Laplace** fleet, 5 seeds — the absolute-error track |
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| | `reference/regularization_stats.parquet` | per-(account, quarter) μ / σ / k — **required** to encode inputs or decode outputs |
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| | `reference/account_id_map.csv` | account name ↔ id; the account embedding is indexed by this, so it must match training |
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| **The weights are inert without the regularization statistics.** Forma predicts a
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| per-account, per-quarter asinh z-score; without (μ, σ, k) you can neither build
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| inputs nor interpret outputs. They ship here for that reason.
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| Training configurations live in the Apache-2.0 code repository
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| ([`forma-release`](https://github.com/forma-lab-mccombs/forma-release)), not here.
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| No firm-identifier map is distributed: Forma consumes no firm identity — there is
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| no firm embedding — so none is needed to run the model.
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|
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| ## Model
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| Gaussian β-NLL, **transformer-only** (no constraint-correction layer, no
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| reconciliation), ~1M parameters. Trained on
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| Compustat quarterly filings 1971–2001, validated 2002–2009, tested 2010+.
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| Universal forecaster: observable accounting and industry data only, no
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| firm-specific identifiers.
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| The released forecasts are the **5-seed equal-weight mixture** of the Gaussian
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| fleet, not any single seed.
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|
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| ## Intended use and limitations
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| Academic research on financial-statement forecasting. **Not investment advice**;
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| see `LICENSE.md` §9.
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|
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| - **Calibration.** The 90% interval is close to nominal (0.905–0.939 measured);
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| the central 50% interval is empirically over-wide (~0.58–0.69 vs 0.50).
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| - **Reg stats stop at 2024Q4.** Applying Forma to later data requires
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| re-estimating (μ, σ, k) from your own Compustat pull — the builder is in the
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| Apache repo. Re-estimated statistics define a *different* target space, and
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| scores computed against them are not comparable to published numbers.
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| - **Financial firms are excluded** (SIC 6000–6999).
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| - **Dollar-space skew.** If you back-transform to dollars, note that a Gaussian
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| in z-space is lognormal-tailed in dollars: use quantiles, and treat the
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| predictive standard deviation as unusable in the tail. See the USD forecast
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| dataset card.
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|
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| ## Related
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|
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| | | |
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| |---|---|
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| | Model code, configs, competitors | [`forma-release`](https://github.com/forma-lab-mccombs/forma-release) (Apache-2.0) |
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| | Benchmark package + builder | [`proforma-20q`](https://github.com/forma-lab-mccombs/proforma-20q) (Apache-2.0) |
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| | Forecasts in USD ($M) | [forma-lab-mccombs/forma-usd-forecasts](https://huggingface.co/datasets/forma-lab-mccombs/forma-usd-forecasts) (WRDS-conditioned, gated) |
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| | Standardized forecasts + sample mask | [forma-lab-mccombs/proforma-20q-artifacts](https://huggingface.co/datasets/forma-lab-mccombs/proforma-20q-artifacts) (WRDS-conditioned, gated) |
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|
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| ## Licence
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|
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| **Forma Non-Commercial Research Licence v1.0** — see `LICENSE.md`.
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| Non-commercial academic research only; no redistribution; attribution required.
|
|
|
| **All commercial rights are reserved to The University of Texas at Austin.** For
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| commercial licensing, contact UT Discovery to Impact (`ip@discoveries.utexas.edu`).
|
|
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| Downloading the weights does **not** require a WRDS/Compustat licence: no
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| Compustat records are distributed here and firm-level values cannot be
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| reconstructed from ~1M model parameters. Rebuilding the training or evaluation
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| data does require your own WRDS access — see the benchmark repo.
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| Some of these weights were previously distributed under Apache-2.0. That grant
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| is irrevocable as to copies already obtained; this licence governs materials
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| obtained here and all subsequent versions (`LICENSE.md` §10).
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| Derived from Compustat under UT Austin's academic subscription. S&P Global
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| Market Intelligence retains all rights in the underlying data.
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|
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| ## Citation
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| See `CITATION.cff` in [`forma-release`](https://github.com/forma-lab-mccombs/forma-release).
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|
