Forecasting price movements in betting exchanges using Cartesian Genetic Programming and ANN

Since the introduction of betting exchanges in 2000, there has been increased interest of ways to monetize on the new technology. Betting exchange markets are fairly similar to the financial markets in terms of their operation. Due to the lower market share and newer technology, there are very few tools available for automated trading for betting exchanges. The in-depth analysis of features available in commercial software demonstrates that there is no commercial software that natively supports machine learned strategy development. Furthermore, previously published academic software products are not publicly obtainable. Hence, this work concentrates on developing a full-stack solution from data capture, back-testing to automated Strategy Agent development for betting exchanges. Moreover, work also explores ways to forecast price movements within betting exchange using new machine learned trading strategies based on Artificial Neuron Networks (ANN) and Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP). Automatically generated strategies can then be deployed on a server and require no human interaction. Data explored in this work were captured from 1st of January 2016 to 17th of May 2016 for all GB WIN Horse Racing markets (total of 204GB of data processing). Best found Strategy agent shows promising 83% Return on Investment (ROI) during simulated historical validation period of one month (15th of April 2016 to 16th of May 2016)

Forecasting Stock Exchange Data using Group Method of Data Handling Neural Network Approach

The increasing uncertainty of the natural world has motivated computer scientists to seek out the best approach to technological problems. Nature-inspired problem-solving approaches include meta-heuristic methods that are focused on evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence. One of these problems significantly impacting information is forecasting exchange index, which is a serious concern with the growth and decline of stock as there are many reports on loss of financial resources or profitability. When the exchange includes an extensive set of diverse stock, particular concepts and mechanisms for physical security, network security, encryption, and permissions should guarantee and predict its future needs. This study aimed to show it is efficient to use the group method of data handling (GMDH)-type neural networks and their application for the classification of numerical results. Such modeling serves to display the precision of GMDH-type neural networks. Following the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in April 2018, the behavior of the stock exchange data stream and commend algorithms has not been able to predict correctly and fit in the network satisfactorily. This paper demonstrated that Group Method Data Handling is most likely to improve inductive self-organizing approaches for addressing realistic severe problems such as the Iranian financial market crisis. A new trajectory would be used to verify the consistency of the obtained equations hence the models' validity

A data mining approach to predict probabilities of football matches

Com um crescimento cada vez maior dos volumes apostados em competições desportivas torna-se importante verificar até onde as técnicas de aprendizagem computacional conseguem trazer valor a esta área. É feita uma avaliação da performance de algoritmos estado-da-arte em diversas métricas, incorporado na metodologia CRISP-DM que é percorrida desde a aquisição de dados via web-scraping, passando pela geração e seleção de features. É também explorado o universo de técnicas de ensemble numa tentativa de melhorar os modelos do ponto de vista do bias-variance trade-off, com especial foco nos ensembles de redes neuronais.With the increasing growth of the amount of money invested in sports betting markets it is important to verify how far the machine learning techniques can bring value to this area. A performance evaluation of the state-of-art algorithms is performed and evaluated according to several metrics, incorporated in the CRISP-DM methodology that goes from web-scraping through to generation and selection of features. It is also explored the universe of ensemble techniques in an attempt to improve the models from the point of view of bias-variance trade-off, with a special focus on neural network ensembles

Sports betting: a new asset class to bet on

This dissertation has the aim to present a complete overview of the current features and activities related to the sports betting industry and to explain the reasons why it can be considered a new asset class to invest on. The first chapter explains the main features of both fixed-odds and exchange betting market, the second describes the activity of sport trading, while the third presents a deep investigation concerning the market efficiency. Chapter 4 shows the arbitrage opportunities implementable in this market, that come from the efficiency study of the previous chapter. Before the conclusion, a personal study about the value betting arbitrage opportunity is presented, confirming that abnormal returns are achievable

Funcionamiento del trading algorítmico en los mercados de capitales

Trabajo final (Licenciatura en Administración con orientación en Finanzas)Propósito: este trabajo tiene como finalidad exponer información acerca del trading algorítmico y su relación con el mercado de capitales, el análisis técnico y fundamental, los activos financieros y sus derivados para todo aquel interesado en interiorizarse en el mundo de las finanzas. Metodología: se realizó una revisión sistemática de literatura, relevando 572 artículos acerca del trading algorítmico, publicados en el periodo 2015-2022. En la búsqueda se aplicaron criterios de exclusión, quedando un total de 29 artículos. Su análisis pertinente permitió contestar las preguntas de investigación y desarrollar la temática elegida. Además, se efectuaron entrevistas semi-estructuradas a personas trabajando en la operatoria de trading. Conclusiones: El trading algorítmico posee ventajas excepcionales sobre el trading discrecional. Entre ellas se destaca la capacidad de procesamiento superior que tiene una computadora que simplifica toda operación y reduce los tiempos empleados y por otro lado, elimina el lado emocional de la toma de decisiones del proceso de inversión. Limitaciones: En el protocolo de investigación se estableció la condición de seleccionar solo artículos de libre acceso y aceptar únicamente los artículos que hayan sido redactados en inglés o el español. Los idiomas de los textos que fueron dejados de lado son francés, alemán, portugués y ucraniano. Originalidad-Valor: El valor del trabajo radica en que se aborda una temática novedosa en el campo de las finanzas por medio de dos metodologías que aportan por un lado información de calidad y con respaldo científico y por otro lado la experiencia y conocimientos de los profesionales entrevistados que actualmente trabajan con esta herramienta.Fil: Castro, Francisco Javier. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas; Argentina.Fil: Gervasoni, Lucía Florencia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas; Argentina.Fil: Giannelli, Agostina Belén. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas; Argentina.Fil: Vogel Dotta, María Sol. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas; Argentina

New Genetic Programming Methods for Rainfall Prediction and Rainfall Derivatives Pricing

Rainfall derivatives is a part of an umbrella concept of weather derivatives, whereby the underlying weather variable determines the value of derivative, in our case the rainfall. These financial contracts are currently in their infancy as they have started trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) since 2011. Such contracts are very useful for investors or trading firms who wish to hedge against the direct or indirect adverse effects of the rainfall. The first crucial problem to focus on in this thesis is the prediction of the level of rainfall. In order to predict this, two techniques are routinely used. The first most commonly used approach is Markov chain extended with rainfall prediction. The second approach is Poisson-cluster model. Both techniques have some weakness in their predictive powers for rainfall data. More specifically, a large number of rainfall pathways obtained from these techniques are not representative of future rainfall levels. Additionally, the predictions are heavily influenced by the prior information, leading to future rainfall levels being the average of previously observed values. This motivates us to develop a new algorithm to the problem domain, based on Genetic Programming (GP), to improve the prediction of the underlying variable rainfall. GP is capable of producing white box (interpretable, as opposed to black box) models, which allows us to probe the models produced. Moreover, we can capture nonlinear and unexpected patterns in the data without making any strict assumptions regarding the data. The daily rainfall data represents some difficulties for GP. The difficulties include the data value being non-negative and discontinuous on the real time line. Moreover, the rainfall data consists of high volatilities and low seasonal time series. This makes the rainfall derivatives much more challenging to deal with than other weather contracts such as temperature or wind. However, GP does not perform well when it is applied directly on the daily rainfall data. We thus propose a data transformation method that improves GP's predictive power. The transformation works by accumulating the daily rainfall amounts into accumulated amounts with a sliding window. To evaluate the performance, we compare the prediction accuracy obtained by GP against the most currently used approach in rainfall derivatives, and six other machine learning algorithms. They are compared on 42 different data sets collected from different cities across the USA and Europe. We discover that GP is able to predict rainfall more accurately than the most currently used approaches in the literature and comparably to other machine learning methods. However, we find that the equations generated by GP are not able to take into account the volatilities and extreme periods of wet and dry rainfall. Thus, we propose decomposing the problem of rainfall into 'sub problems' for GP to solve. We decompose the time series of rainfall by creating a partition to represent a selected range of the total rainfall amounts, where each partition is modelled by a separate equation from GP. We use a Genetic Algorithm to assist with the partitioning of data. We find that through the decomposition of the data, we are able to predict the underlying data better than all machine learning benchmark methods. Moreover, GP is able to provide a better representation of the extreme periods in the rainfall time series. The natural progression is to price rainfall futures contracts from rainfall prediction. Unlike other pricing domains in the trading market, there is no generally recognised pricing framework used within the literature. Much of this is due to weather derivatives (including rainfall derivatives) existing in an incomplete market, where the existing and well-studied pricing methods cannot be directly applied. There are two well-known techniques for pricing, the first is through indifference pricing and the second is through arbitrage free pricing. One of the requirements for pricing is knowing the level of risk or uncertainty that exists within the market. This allows for a contract price free of arbitrage. GP can be used to price derivatives, but the risk cannot be directly estimated. To estimate the risk, we must calculate a density of proposed rainfall values from a single GP equation, in order to calculate the most probable outcome. We propose three methods to achieve the required results. The first is through the procedure of sampling many different equations and extrapolating a density from the best of each generation over multiple runs. The second proposal builds on the first considering contract-specific equations, rather than a single equation explaining all contracts before extrapolating a density. The third method is the proposition of GP evolving and creating a collection of stochastic equations for pricing rainfall derivatives. We find that GP is a suitable method for pricing and both proposed methods are able to produce good pricing results. Our first and second methods are capable of pricing closer to the rainfall futures prices given by the CME. Moreover, we find that our third method reproduces the actual rainfall for the specified period of interest more accurately

OptPlatform: metaheuristic optimisation framework for solving complex real-world problems

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonWe optimise daily, whether that is planning a round trip that visits the most attractions within a given holiday budget or just taking a train instead of driving a car in a rush hour. Many problems, just like these, are solved by individuals as part of our daily schedule, and they are effortless and straightforward. If we now scale that to many individuals with many different schedules, like a school timetable, we get to a point where it is just not feasible or practical to solve by hand. In such instances, optimisation methods are used to obtain an optimal solution. In this thesis, a practical approach to optimisation has been taken by developing an optimisation platform with all the necessary tools to be used by practitioners who are not necessarily familiar with the subject of optimisation. First, a high-performance metaheuristic optimisation framework (MOF) called OptPlatform is implemented, and the versatility and performance are evaluated across multiple benchmarks and real-world optimisation problems. Results show that, compared to competing MOFs, the OptPlatform outperforms in both the solution quality and computation time. Second, the most suitable hardware platform for OptPlatform is determined by an in-depth analysis of Ant Colony Optimisation scaling across CPU, GPU and enterprise Xeon Phi. Contrary to the common benchmark problems used in the literature, the supply chain problem solved could not scale on GPUs. Third, a variety of metaheuristics are implemented into OptPlatform. Including, a new metaheuristic based on Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA), called ICA with Independence and Constrained Assimilation (ICAwICA) is proposed. The ICAwICA was compared against two different types of benchmark problems, and results show the versatile application of the algorithm, matching and in some cases outperforming the custom-tuned approaches. Finally, essential MOF features like automatic algorithm selection and tuning, lacking on existing frameworks, are implemented in OptPlatform. Two novel approaches are proposed and compared to existing methods. Results indicate the superiority of the implemented tuning algorithms within constrained tuning budget environment

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

B

The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence: Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms

After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms

The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence

After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms