FinSQL: Model-Agnostic LLMs-based Text-to-SQL Framework for Financial Analysis

Text-to-SQL, which provides zero-code interface for operating relational databases, has gained much attention in financial analysis; because, financial professionals may not well-skilled in SQL programming. However, until now, there is no practical Text-to-SQL benchmark dataset for financial analysis, and existing Text-to-SQL methods have not considered the unique characteristics of databases in financial applications, such as commonly existing wide tables. To address these issues, we collect a practical Text-to-SQL benchmark dataset and propose a model-agnostic Large Language Model (LLMs)-based Text-to-SQL framework for financial analysis. The benchmark dataset, BULL, is collected from the practical financial analysis business of Hundsun Technologies Inc., including databases for fund, stock, and macro economy. Besides, the proposed LLMs-based Text-to-SQL framework, FinSQL, provides a systematic treatment for financial Text-to-SQL from the perspectives of prompt construction, parameter-efficient fine-tuning and output calibration. Extensive experimental results on BULL demonstrate that FinSQL achieves the state-of-the-art Text-to-SQL performance at a small cost; furthermore, FinSQL can bring up to 36.64% performance improvement in scenarios requiring few-shot cross-database model transfer.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figure

C3: Zero-shot Text-to-SQL with ChatGPT

This paper proposes a ChatGPT-based zero-shot Text-to-SQL method, dubbed C3, which achieves 82.3\% in terms of execution accuracy on the holdout test set of Spider and becomes the state-of-the-art zero-shot Text-to-SQL method on the Spider Challenge. C3 consists of three key components: Clear Prompting (CP), Calibration with Hints (CH), and Consistent Output (CO), which are corresponding to the model input, model bias and model output respectively. It provides a systematic treatment for zero-shot Text-to-SQL. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Determination of the number of ψ(3686)\psi(3686) events at BESIII

The numbers of ψ(3686) events accumulated by the BESIII detector for the data taken during 2009 and 2012 are determined to be and , respectively, by counting inclusive hadronic events, where the uncertainties are systematic and the statistical uncertainties are negligible. The number of events for the sample taken in 2009 is consistent with that of the previous measurement. The total number of ψ(3686) events for the two data taking periods is