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