Dynamic Generation of Investment Recommendations Using Grammatical Evolution

The attainment of trading rules using Grammatical Evolution traditionally follows a static approach. A single rule is obtained and then used to generate investment recommendations over time. The main disadvantage of this approach is that it does not consider the need to adapt to the structural changes that are often associated with financial time series. We improve the canonical approach introducing an alternative that involves a dynamic selection mechanism that switches between an active rule and a candidate one optimized for the most recent market data available. The proposed solution seeks the flexibility required by structural changes while limiting the transaction costs commonly associated with constant model updates. The performance of the algorithm is compared with four alternatives: the standard static approach; a sliding window-based generation of trading rules that are used for a single time period, and two ensemble-based strategies. The experimental results, based on market data, show that the suggested approach beats the rest

Dynamic generation of investment recommendations using grammatical evolution

The attainment of trading rules using Grammatical Evolution traditionally follows a static approach. A single rule is obtained and then used to generate investment recommendations over time. The main disadvantage of this approach is that it does not consider the need to adapt to the structural changes that are often associated with financial time series. We improve the canonical approach introducing an alternative that involves a dynamic selection mechanism that switches between an active rule and a candidate one optimized for the most recent market data available. The proposed solution seeks the flexibility required by structural changes while limiting the transaction costs commonly associated with constant model updates. The performance of the algorithm is compared with four alternatives: the standard static approach; a sliding window-based generation of trading rules that are used for a single time period, and two ensemble-based strategies. The experimental results, based on market data, show that the suggested approach beats the rest.The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under grant PGC2018-096849-B-I00 (MCFin). This work has been supported by the Madrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid-Spain) under the Multiannual Agreement with UC3M in the line of Excellence of University Professors (EPUC3MXX), and in the context of the V PRICIT (Regional Programme of Research and Technological Innovation)

Machine Learning for Financial Prediction Under Regime Change Using Technical Analysis: A Systematic Review

Recent crises, recessions and bubbles have stressed the non-stationary nature and the presence of drastic structural changes in the financial domain. The most recent literature suggests the use of conventional machine learning and statistical approaches in this context. Unfortunately, several of these techniques are unable or slow to adapt to changes in the price-generation process. This study aims to survey the relevant literature on Machine Learning for financial prediction under regime change employing a systematic approach. It reviews key papers with a special emphasis on technical analysis. The study discusses the growing number of contributions that are bridging the gap between two separate communities, one focused on data stream learning and the other on economic research. However, it also makes apparent that we are still in an early stage. The range of machine learning algorithms that have been tested in this domain is very wide, but the results of the study do not suggest that currently there is a specific technique that is clearly dominant

Trading the stock market : hybrid financial analyses and evolutionary computation

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática, leída el 02-07-2014Esta tesis presenta la implementación de un innovador sistema de comercio automatizado que utiliza tres importantes análisis para determinar lugares y momentos de inversión. Para ello, este trabajo profundiza en sistemas automáticos de comercio y estudia series temporales de precios históricos pertenecientes a empresas que cotizan en el mercado bursátil. Estudiamos y clasifcamos las series temporales mediante el uso de una novedosa metodología basada en compresores de software. Este nuevo enfoque permite un estudio teórico de la formación de precios que demuestra resultados de divergencia entre precios reales de mercado y precios modelados mediante paseos aleatorios, apoyando así el desarrollo de modelos predictivos basados en el análisis de patrones históricos como los descritos en este documento. Además, esta metodología nos permite estudiar el comportamiento de series temporales de precios históricos en distintos sectores industriales mediante la búsqueda de patrones en empresas pertenecientes al mismo sector. Los resultados muestran agrupaciones que indican tendencias de mercado compartidas y ,por tanto, señalan que la inclusión de un análisis industrial puede reportar ventajas en la toma de decisiones de inversión. Comprobada la factibilidad de un sistema de predicción basado en series temporales y demostrada la existencia de tendencias macroeconómicas en las diferentes industrias, proponemos el desarrollo del sistema completo a través de diferentes etapas. Iterativamente y mediante varias aproximaciones, testeamos y analizamos las piezas que componen el sistema nal. Las primeras fases describen un sistema de comercio automatizado, basado en análisis técnico y fundamental de empresas, que presenta altos rendimientos y reduce el riesgo de pérdidas. El sistema utiliza un motor de optimización guiado por una versión modi cada de un algoritmo genético el la que presentamos operadores innovadores que proporcionan mecanismos para evitar una convergencia prematura del algoritmo y mejorar los resultados de rendimiento nales. Utilizando este mismo sistema de comercio automático proponemos técnicas de optimización novedosas en relación a uno de los problemas más característicos de estos sistemas, el tiempo de ejecución. Presentamos la paralelización del sistema de comercio automatizado mediante dos técnicas de computación paralela, computación distribuida y procesamiento grá co. Ambas arquitecturas presentan aceleraciones elevadas alcanzando los x50 y x256 respectivamente. Estápas posteriores presentan un cambio de metodologia de optimización, algoritmos genéticos por evolución gramatical, que nos permite comparar ambas estrategias e implementar características más avanzadas como reglas más complejas o la auto-generación de nuevos indicadores técnicos. Testearemos, con datos nancieros recientes, varios sistemas de comercio basados en diferentes funciones de aptitud, incluyendo una innovadora versión multi-objetivo, que nos permitirán analizar las ventajas de cada función de aptitud. Finalmente, describimos y testeamos la metodología del sistema de comercio automatizado basado en una doble capa de gramáticas evolutivas y que combina un análisis técnico, fundamental y macroeconómico en un análisis top-down híbrido. Los resultados obtenidos muestran rendimientos medios del 30% con muy pocas operaciones de perdidas.This thesis concerns to the implementation of a complex and pioneering automated trading system which uses three critical analysis to determine time-decisions and portfolios for investments. To this end, this work delves into automated trading systems and studies time series of historical prices related to companies listed in stock markets. Time series are studied using a novel methodology based on clusterings by software compressors. This new approach allows a theoretical study of price formation which shows results of divergence between market prices and prices modelled by random walks, thus supporting the implementation of predictive models based on the analysis of historical patterns. Furthermore, this methodology also provides us the tool to study behaviours of time series of historical prices from di erent industrial sectors seeking patterns among companies in the same industry. Results show clusters of companies pointing out market trends among companies developing similar activities, and suggesting a macroeconomic analysis to take advantage of investment decisions. Tested the feasibility of prediction systems based on analyses related to time series of historical prices and tested the existence of macroeconomic trends in the industries, we propose the implementation of a hybrid automated trading system through several stages which iteratively describe and test the components of the nal system. In the early stages, we implement an automated trading system based on technical and fundamental analysis of companies, it presents high returns and reducing losses. The implementation uses a methodology guided by a modi ed version of a genetic algorithm which presents novel genetic operators avoiding the premature convergence and improving nal results. Using the same automated trading system we propose novel optimization techniques related to one of the characteristic problems of these systems: the execution time. We present the parallelisation of the system using two parallel computing techniques, rst using distributed computation and, second, implementing a version for graphics processors. Both architectures achieve high speed-ups, reaching 50x and 256x respectively, thus, they present the necessary speed-ups required by systems analysing huge amount of nancial data. Subsequent stages present a transformation in the methodology, genetic algorithms for grammatical evolution, which allows us to compare the two evolutionary strategies and to implement more advanced features such as more complex rules or the self-generation of new technical indicators. In this context, we describe several automated trading system versions guided by di erent tness functions, including an innovative multi-objective version that we test with recent nancial data analysing the advantages of each tness function. Finally, we describe and test the methodology of an automated trading system based on a double layer of grammatical evolution combining technical, fundamental and macroeconomic analysis on a hybrid topdown analysis. The results show average returns of 30% with low number of negative operations.Depto. de Arquitectura de Computadores y AutomáticaFac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu

Applications of Genetic Programming to Finance and Economics: Past, Present, Future

While the origins of Genetic Programming (GP) stretch back over fifty years, the field of GP was invigorated by John Koza’s popularisation of the methodology in the 1990s. A particular feature of the GP literature since then has been a strong interest in the application of GP to real-world problem domains. One application domain which has attracted significant attention is that of finance and economics, with several hundred papers from this subfield being listed in the Genetic Programming Bibliography. In this article we outline why finance and economics has been a popular application area for GP and briefly indicate the wide span of this work. However, despite this research effort there is relatively scant evidence of the usage of GP by the mainstream finance community in academia or industry. We speculate why this may be the case, describe what is needed to make this research more relevant from a finance perspective, and suggest some future directions for the application of GP in finance and economics

Automated design of genetic programming of classification algorithms.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.Over the past decades, there has been an increase in the use of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for data mining and knowledge discovery in a wide range of application domains. Data classification, a real-world application problem is one of the areas EAs have been widely applied. Data classification has been extensively researched resulting in the development of a number of EA based classification algorithms. Genetic programming (GP) in particular has been shown to be one of the most effective EAs at inducing classifiers. It is widely accepted that the effectiveness of a parameterised algorithm like GP depends on its configuration. Currently, the design of GP classification algorithms is predominantly performed manually. Manual design follows an iterative trial and error approach which has been shown to be a menial, non-trivial time-consuming task that has a number of vulnerabilities. The research presented in this thesis is part of a large-scale initiative by the machine learning community to automate the design of machine learning techniques. The study investigates the hypothesis that automating the design of GP classification algorithms for data classification can still lead to the induction of effective classifiers. This research proposes using two evolutionary algorithms,namely,ageneticalgorithm(GA)andgrammaticalevolution(GE)toautomatethe design of GP classification algorithms. The proof-by-demonstration research methodology is used in the study to achieve the set out objectives. To that end two systems namely, a genetic algorithm system and a grammatical evolution system were implemented for automating the design of GP classification algorithms. The classification performance of the automated designed GP classifiers, i.e., GA designed GP classifiers and GE designed GP classifiers were compared to manually designed GP classifiers on real-world binary class and multiclass classification problems. The evaluation was performed on multiple domain problems obtained from the UCI machine learning repository and on two specific domains, cybersecurity and financial forecasting. The automated designed classifiers were found to outperform the manually designed GP classifiers on all the problems considered in this study. GP classifiers evolved by GE were found to be suitable for classifying binary classification problems while those evolved by a GA were found to be suitable for multiclass classification problems. Furthermore, the automated design time was found to be less than manual design time. Fitness landscape analysis of the design spaces searched by a GA and GE were carried out on all the class of problems considered in this study. Grammatical evolution found the search to be smoother on binary classification problems while the GA found multiclass problems to be less rugged than binary class problems