Feature engineering for mid-price prediction with deep learning

Mid-price movement prediction based on limit order book (LOB) data is a challenging task due to the complexity and dynamics of the LOB. So far, there have been very limited attempts for extracting relevant features based on LOB data. In this paper, we address this problem by designing a new set of handcrafted features and performing an extensive experimental evaluation on both liquid and illiquid stocks. More specifically, we implement a new set of econometrical features that capture statistical properties of the underlying securities for the task of mid-price prediction. Moreover, we develop a new experimental protocol for online learning that treats the task as a multi-objective optimization problem and predicts i) the direction of the next price movement and ii) the number of order book events that occur until the change takes place. In order to predict the mid-price movement, the features are fed into nine different deep learning models based on multi-layer perceptrons (MLP), convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. The performance of the proposed method is then evaluated on liquid and illiquid stocks, which are based on TotalView-ITCH US and Nordic stocks, respectively. For some stocks, results suggest that the correct choice of a feature set and a model can lead to the successful prediction of how long it takes to have a stock price movement

DeepLOB: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Limit Order Books

We develop a large-scale deep learning model to predict price movements from limit order book (LOB) data of cash equities. The architecture utilises convolutional filters to capture the spatial structure of the limit order books as well as LSTM modules to capture longer time dependencies. The proposed network outperforms all existing state-of-the-art algorithms on the benchmark LOB dataset [1]. In a more realistic setting, we test our model by using one year market quotes from the London Stock Exchange and the model delivers a remarkably stable out-of-sample prediction accuracy for a variety of instruments. Importantly, our model translates well to instruments which were not part of the training set, indicating the model's ability to extract universal features. In order to better understand these features and to go beyond a "black box" model, we perform a sensitivity analysis to understand the rationale behind the model predictions and reveal the components of LOBs that are most relevant. The ability to extract robust features which translate well to other instruments is an important property of our model which has many other applications.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Tensor Representation in High-Frequency Financial Data for Price Change Prediction

Nowadays, with the availability of massive amount of trade data collected, the dynamics of the financial markets pose both a challenge and an opportunity for high frequency traders. In order to take advantage of the rapid, subtle movement of assets in High Frequency Trading (HFT), an automatic algorithm to analyze and detect patterns of price change based on transaction records must be available. The multichannel, time-series representation of financial data naturally suggests tensor-based learning algorithms. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of two multilinear methods for the mid-price prediction problem against other existing methods. The experiments in a large scale dataset which contains more than 4 millions limit orders show that by utilizing tensor representation, multilinear models outperform vector-based approaches and other competing ones.Comment: accepted in SSCI 2017, typos fixe