An interpretable 1D-CNN framework for stock price forecasting : a comparative study with LSTM and ARIMA

Deep learning has transformed numerous areas of data science by achieving outstanding performance in tasks such as image recognition, speech processing, and natural language understanding. Recently, the challenges of financial forecasting-marked by nonlinear dynamics, volatility, and regime shifts-have attracted increasing attention from the deep learning community. Among these approaches, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), originally developed for spatial data, have shown strong potential for modelling financial time series. This study presents an interpretable CNN-based framework for stock price forecasting using the S&P 500 index as a case study. The proposed approach integrates historical price data with technical indicators within a unified experimental design and compares performance against traditional statistical (ARIMA) and sequential deep learning (LSTM) baselines. Empirical results demonstrate that the CNN model achieves superior predictive Accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency and interpretability through SHAP and Grad-CAM analyses. The findings suggest that lightweight CNN architectures can serve as effective, transparent tools for short-horizon financial forecasting, and future research may extend this framework to multimodal settings incorporating sentiment or news-based data.