The Graphical Lasso and its Financial Applications

Way back in November 2007, literally weeks after SPX put in its pre-GFC all-time high, Friedman, Hastie and Tibshirani published their Graphical Lasso algorithm for estimation of the sparse inverse covariance matrix. Are you suggesting that Friedman and his titans of statistical learning somehow caused the GFC by publishing their Graphical Lasso algorithm? Not at …

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From Potential to Proven: Why AI is Taking Off in the Finance World

This article is a departure from the quantitative research that usually appears on the Robot Wealth blog. Until recently, I was working as a machine learning consultant to financial services organizations and trading firms in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. A few months ago, I left that world behind to join an ex-client’s proprietary …

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Neural Network Trading: A Getting Started Guide for Algo Trading

This article is adapted from one of the units of Advanced Algorithmic Trading. If you like what you see, check out the entire curriculum here. Find out what Robot Wealth is all about here. If you’re interested in using artificial neural networks (ANNs) for algorithmic trading, but don’t know where to start, then this article …

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Optimal Data Windows for Training a Machine Learning Model for Financial Prediction

It would be great if machine learning were as simple as just feeding data to an out-of-the box implementation of some learning algorithm, then standing back and admiring the predictive utility of the output. As anyone who has dabbled in this area will confirm, it is never that simple. We have features to engineer and …

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Machine Learning in Algorithmic Trading Systems: Opportunities and Pitfalls

Last night it was my pleasure to present at the Tyro Fintech Hub in Sydney on the topic of using machine learning in algorithmic trading systems. Here you can download the presentation Many thanks to all who attended and particularly for the engaging questions. I thoroughly enjoyed myself! In particular, thanks to Andrien Juric for oraganising …

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Machine learning for Trading: Part 2

Introduction My first post on using machine learning for financial prediction took an in-depth look at various feature selection methods as a data pre-processing step in the quest to mine financial data for profitable patterns. I looked at various methods to identify predictive features including Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC), Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), algorithms with …

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Machine learning for Trading:
Adventures in Feature Selection

Updates: 2019: In this first Machine Learning for Trading post, we’ve added a section on feature selection using the Boruta package, equity curves of a simple trading system, and some Lite-C code that generates the training data.  2020: I’ve updated the original post with some new thinking about data-mining, refreshed the code, updated the data and …

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A framework for rapid and robust system development based on k-means clustering

Important preface: This post is in no way intended to showcase a particular trading strategy. It is purely to share and demonstrate the use of the framework I’ve put together to speed the research and development process for a particular type of trading strategy. Comments and critiques regarding the framework and the methodology used are most …

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Unsupervised candlestick classification for fun and profit – part 2

In the last article, I described an application of the k-means clustering algorithm for classifying candlesticks based on the relative position of their open, high, low and close. This was a simple enough exercise, but now I tackle something more challenging: isolating information that is both useful and practical to real trading. I’ll initially try two …

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Unsupervised candlestick classification for fun and profit – part 1

Candlestick patterns were used to trade the rice market in Japan back in the 1800’s. Steve Nison popularised the idea in the western world and claims that the technique, which is based on the premise that the appearance of certain patterns portend the future direction of the market, is applicable to modern financial markets. Today, …

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