Deep Neural Nets for Volatility Dynamics

There doesn't seem to be much need for nonparametric nonlinear modeling in empirical macro and finance. Not that lots of smart people haven't tried. The two key nonlinearities (volatility dynamics and regime switching) just seem to be remarkably well handled by tightly-parametric customized models (GARCH/SV and Markov-switching, respectively). 

But the popular volatility models are effectively linear (ARMA) in squares. Maybe that's too rigidly constrained. Volatility dynamics seem like something that could be nonlinear in ways much richer than just ARMA in squares. 

Here's an attempt using deep neural nets. I'm not convinced by the paper -- much more thorough analysis and results are required than the 22 numbers reported in the "GARCH" and "stocvol" columns of its Table 1 -- but I'm intrigued.

It's quite striking that neural nets, which have been absolutely transformative in other areas of predictive modeling, have thus far contributed so little in economic / financial contexts. Maybe the "deep" versions will change that, at least for volatility modeling. Or maybe not.