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Fabrizio Lillo

Fabrizio Lillo contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

GravityGraphSAGE: Link Prediction in Directed Attributed Graphs

Link prediction (inferring missing or future connections between nodes in a graph) is a fundamental problem in network science with widespread applications in, e.g., biological systems, recommender systems, finance and cybersecurity. The ability to accurately predict links has significant real-world applications, such as detecting fraudulent financial transactions or identifying drug-target interactions in biomedicine. Despite a rich literature, link prediction is still challenging, especially for graphs enriched with information on edges (direction) and nodes (attributes). In fact, research on link prediction, especially the one based on Graph Deep Learning (GDL), has mostly focused on undirected graphs, without fully leveraging node attributes. Here, we fill this gap by proposing Gravity-GraphSAGE (GG-SAGE), a modified version of GraphSAGE, a GDL model for node embeddings, composed of a gravity-inspired decoder. This implementation is the first example in the literature of a GraphSAGE backbone adopted for directed link prediction. Using the benchmark datasets Cora, Citeseer, PubMed and 16 real-world graphs from the online Netzschleuder repository, we show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art GDL link prediction techniques. Using further experimental evidence, we relate the quality of the output of our model with various characteristics of the graph, suggesting that our framework scales well when applied to data of increasing complexity.

preprint2022arXiv

How Covid mobility restrictions modified the population of investors in Italian stock markets

This paper investigates how Covid mobility restrictions impacted the population of investors of the Italian stock market. The analysis tracks the trading activity of individual investors in Italian stocks in the period January 2019-September 2021, investigating how their composition and the trading activity changed around the Covid-19 lockdown period (March 9 - May 19, 2020) and more generally in the period of the pandemic. The results pinpoint that the lockdown restriction was accompanied by a surge in interest toward stock market, as testified by the trading volume by households. Given the generically falling prices during the lockdown, the households, which are typically contrarian, were net buyers, even if less than expected from their trading activity in 2019. This can be explained by the arrival, during the lockdown, of a group of about 185k new investors (i.e. which had never traded since January 2019) which were on average ten year younger and with a larger fraction of males than the pre-lockdown investors. By looking at the gross P&L, there is clear evidence that these new investors were more skilled in trading. There are thus indications that the lockdown, and more generally the Covid pandemic, created a sort of regime change in the population of financial investors.

preprint2022arXiv

Score Driven Generalized Fitness Model for Sparse and Weighted Temporal Networks

While the vast majority of the literature on models for temporal networks focuses on binary graphs, often one can associate a weight to each link. In such cases the data are better described by a weighted, or valued, network. An important well known fact is that real world weighted networks are typically sparse. We propose a novel time varying parameter model for sparse and weighted temporal networks as a combination of the fitness model, appropriately extended, and the score driven framework. We consider a zero augmented generalized linear model to handle the weights and an observation driven approach to describe time varying parameters. The result is a flexible approach where the probability of a link to exist is independent from its expected weight. This represents a crucial difference with alternative specifications proposed in the recent literature, with relevant implications for the flexibility of the model. Our approach also accommodates for the dependence of the network dynamics on external variables. We present a link forecasting analysis to data describing the overnight exposures in the Euro interbank market and investigate whether the influence of EONIA rates on the interbank network dynamics has changed over time.

preprint2021arXiv

Estimating the Total Volume of Queries to a Search Engine

We study the problem of estimating the total number of searches (volume) of queries in a specific domain, which were submitted to a search engine in a given time period. Our statistical model assumes that the distribution of searches follows a Zipf's law, and that the observed sample volumes are biased accordingly to three possible scenarios. These assumptions are consistent with empirical data, with keyword research practices, and with approximate algorithms used to take counts of query frequencies. A few estimators of the parameters of the distribution are devised and experimented, based on the nature of the empirical/simulated data. For continuous data, we recommend using nonlinear least square regression (NLS) on the top-volume queries, where the bound on the volume is obtained from the well-known Clauset, Shalizi and Newman (CSN) estimation of power-law parameters. For binned data, we propose using a Chi-square minimization approach restricted to the top-volume queries, where the bound is obtained by the binned version of the CSN method. Estimations are then derived for the total number of queries and for the total volume of the population, including statistical error bounds. We apply the methods on the domain of recipes and cooking queries searched in Italian in 2017. The observed volumes of sample queries are collected from Google Trends (continuous data) and SearchVolume (binned data). The estimated total number of queries and total volume are computed for the two cases, and the results are compared and discussed.

preprint2021arXiv

Information dynamics of price and liquidity around the 2017 Bitcoin markets crash

We study the information dynamics between the largest Bitcoin exchange markets during the bubble in 2017-2018. By analysing high-frequency market-microstructure observables with different information theoretic measures for dynamical systems, we find temporal changes in information sharing across markets. In particular, we study the time-varying components of predictability, memory, and synchronous coupling, measured by transfer entropy, active information storage, and multi-information. By comparing these empirical findings with several models we argue that some results could relate to intra-market and inter-market regime shifts, and changes in direction of information flow between different market observables.

preprint2020arXiv

A tale of two sentiment scales: Disentangling short-run and long-run components in multivariate sentiment dynamics

We propose a novel approach to sentiment data filtering for a portfolio of assets. In our framework, a dynamic factor model drives the evolution of the observed sentiment and allows to identify two distinct components: a long-term component, modeled as a random walk, and a short-term component driven by a stationary VAR(1) process. Our model encompasses alternative approaches available in literature and can be readily estimated by means of Kalman filtering and expectation maximization. This feature makes it convenient when the cross-sectional dimension of the portfolio increases. By applying the model to a portfolio of Dow Jones stocks, we find that the long term component co-integrates with the market principal factor, while the short term one captures transient swings of the market associated with the idiosyncratic components and captures the correlation structure of returns. Using quantile regressions, we assess the significance of the contemporaneous and lagged explanatory power of sentiment on returns finding strong statistical evidence when extreme returns, especially negative ones, are considered. Finally, the lagged relation is exploited in a portfolio allocation exercise.

preprint2020arXiv

Betweenness centrality for temporal multiplexes

Betweenness centrality quantifies the importance of a vertex for the information flow in a network. We propose a flexible definition of betweenness for temporal multiplexes, where geodesics are determined accounting for the topological and temporal structure and the duration of paths. We propose an algorithm to compute the new metric via a mapping to a static graph. We show the importance of considering the temporal multiplex structure and an appropriate distance metric comparing the results with those obtained with static or single-layer metrics on a dataset of $\sim 20$k European flights.

preprint2020arXiv

Unveiling the relation between herding and liquidity with trader lead-lag networks

We propose a method to infer lead-lag networks of traders from the observation of their trade record as well as to reconstruct their state of supply and demand when they do not trade. The method relies on the Kinetic Ising model to describe how information propagates among traders, assigning a positive or negative "opinion" to all agents about whether the traded asset price will go up or down. This opinion is reflected by their trading behavior, but whenever the trader is not active in a given time window, a missing value will arise. Using a recently developed inference algorithm, we are able to reconstruct a lead-lag network and to estimate the unobserved opinions, giving a clearer picture about the state of supply and demand in the market at all times. We apply our method to a dataset of clients of a major dealer in the Foreign Exchange market at the 5 minutes time scale. We identify leading players in the market and define a herding measure based on the observed and inferred opinions. We show the causal link between herding and liquidity in the inter-dealer market used by dealers to rebalance their inventories.

preprint2018arXiv

Cashtag piggybacking: uncovering spam and bot activity in stock microblogs on Twitter

Microblogs are increasingly exploited for predicting prices and traded volumes of stocks in financial markets. However, it has been demonstrated that much of the content shared in microblogging platforms is created and publicized by bots and spammers. Yet, the presence (or lack thereof) and the impact of fake stock microblogs has never systematically been investigated before. Here, we study 9M tweets related to stocks of the 5 main financial markets in the US. By comparing tweets with financial data from Google Finance, we highlight important characteristics of Twitter stock microblogs. More importantly, we uncover a malicious practice - referred to as cashtag piggybacking - perpetrated by coordinated groups of bots and likely aimed at promoting low-value stocks by exploiting the popularity of high-value ones. Among the findings of our study is that as much as 71% of the authors of suspicious financial tweets are classified as bots by a state-of-the-art spambot detection algorithm. Furthermore, 37% of them were suspended by Twitter a few months after our investigation. Our results call for the adoption of spam and bot detection techniques in all studies and applications that exploit user-generated content for predicting the stock market.