Enhancing Regime Shift Detection Using Unstructured Data: A Study on the Treasury Market

Abstract: Regime shifts in financial markets reorganise the joint dynamics of asset prices and macro variables, breaking any single-regime calibration. They are nonetheless difficult to detect reliably because the data signal is noisy and heavily multicollinear, while the contemporaneous text that announces them is unstructured. Standard regime shift detection methods rely solely on structured time-series data and ignore policy communications, even though these texts often signal shifts before they materialise in observed prices. We propose a text-enhanced regime shift detection pipeline that combines LLM reasoning over central-bank communications with statistical validation on multivariate financial time series. The framework is detector-agnostic: text-proposed candidates are validated using a bootstrap likelihood-ratio test on a vector autoregression (VAR), while data-driven candidates from arbitrary regime detectors are ratified through a lenient LLM text check. We evaluate the framework on 2010-2024 FOMC minutes paired with a 14-variable U.S. Treasury and macroeconomic panel, using four interchangeable data-driven detectors. The proposed pipeline achieves F1 = 0.82 against a verified anchor list of monetary-policy regime shifts, with same-day modal detection latency and consistently stronger performance than pure data-driven baselines. The results demonstrate that combining unstructured policy text with statistical structural-break detection improves the robustness and interpretability of regime shift identification in financial markets.