Combining Ordinal Financial Predictions with Genetic Programming

Ordinal data play an important part in financial forecasting. For example, advice from expert sources may take the form of "bullish", "bearish" or "sluggish", or "buy" or "do not buy". This paper describes an application of using Genetic Programming (GP) to combine investment opinions. The aim is to combine ordinal forecast from different opinion sources in order to make better predictions. We tested our implementation, FGP (Financial Genetic Programming), on two data sets. In both cases, FGP generated more accurate rules than the individual input rules.

[1]  E. Fama,et al.  Filter Rules and Stock-Market Trading , 1966 .

[2]  David E. Goldberg,et al.  Genetic Algorithms in Search Optimization and Machine Learning , 1988 .

[3]  Christopher J. Neely,et al.  Is Technical Analysis in the Foreign Exchange Market Profitable? A Genetic Programming Approach , 1996, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

[4]  K. Wall,et al.  A preference-based method for forecast combination , 1989 .

[5]  Peter J. Angeline,et al.  Advances in genetic programming: volume 2 , 1996 .

[6]  Shu-Heng Chen,et al.  Speculative trades and financial regulations: simulations based on genetic programming , 1997, Proceedings of the IEEE/IAFE 1997 Computational Intelligence for Financial Engineering (CIFEr).

[7]  Ron Kohavi,et al.  A Study of Cross-Validation and Bootstrap for Accuracy Estimation and Model Selection , 1995, IJCAI.

[8]  Gerald J. Lobo Alternative methods of combining security analysts' and statistical forecasts of annual corporate earnings , 1991 .

[9]  Pui Lam Leung,et al.  Combining ordinal forecasts with an application in a financial market , 1996 .

[10]  B. LeBaron,et al.  Simple Technical Trading Rules and the Stochastic Properties of Stock Returns , 1992 .

[11]  J. K. Kinnear,et al.  Advances in Genetic Programming , 1994 .

[12]  John R. Koza,et al.  Genetic programming - on the programming of computers by means of natural selection , 1993, Complex adaptive systems.

[13]  John R. Koza Proceedings of the 1st annual conference on genetic programming , 1996 .

[14]  R. Sweeney,et al.  Some New Filter Rule Tests: Methods and Results , 1988, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

[15]  David Haussler,et al.  How to use expert advice , 1993, STOC.

[16]  Maureen O'Hara,et al.  Market Statistics and Technical Analysis: The Role of Volume , 1994 .

[17]  J. Campbell,et al.  The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance , 1994 .

[18]  John H. Holland,et al.  Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems: An Introductory Analysis with Applications to Biology, Control, and Artificial Intelligence , 1992 .

[19]  Edward Tsang,et al.  EDDIE beats the bookies , 1998 .