HQNN-CL: Regime-Aware Hybrid Quantum Neural Network with Continual Learning for Financial Forecasting
Muhammad Atif Saeed, Akhtar Jamil, Subhan Ullah
Abstract
Financial time-series forecasting is still difficult owing to the non-stationary nature of the market, regime changes, and catastrophic forgetting, which makes conventional deep learning models hard to adapt in the long term. To achieve uncertainty-aware robust financial forecasting in the face of changing market conditions, this study proposes a Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Network with Continual Learning (HQNN-CL). The proposed framework combines Gaussian Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based regime detection, BiLSTM temporal encoding, adaptive-depth parameterized quantum circuits, Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), experience replay, and probabilistic forecasting in a single architecture. The framework was tested on four real-time stock datasets: Microsoft, Systems Limited, Teradata and Tata Consultancy Services, and compared with seven state-of-the-art forecasting models, including recurrent and Transformer-based models. The experimental results show that HQNN-CL has outperformed other methods on the Systems Limited (RMSE = 3.0149) and Teradata (RMSE = 0.8909) datasets and is within 0.32% and 0.40% of the best baseline method for Microsoft and Tata Consultancy Services, respectively. The proposed framework also generates well-calibrated probabilistic forecasts within the range of 89.5% to 96.5% empirical coverage rate, has zero catastrophic forgetting (BWT = 0.0000) for all sequential learning tasks, and consistently shows positive forward transfer. Ablation and statistical significance analyses also validate the performance of adaptive quantum feature learning and continual adaptation under heterogeneous market conditions, regime-wise.