How Robust are Limit Order Book Representations under Data Perturbation?

The success of machine learning models in the financial domain is highly reliant on the quality of the data representation. In this paper, we focus on the representation of limit order book data and discuss the opportunities and challenges for learning representations of such data. We also experimentally analyse the issues associated with existing representations and present a guideline for future research in this area.

A Framework for Institutional Risk Identification using Knowledge Graphs and Automated News Profiling

Organizations around the world face an array of risks impacting their operations globally. It is imperative to have a robust risk identification process to detect and evaluate the impact of potential risks before they materialize. Given the nature of the task and the current requirements of deep subject matter expertise, most organizations utilize a heavily manual process. In our work, we develop an automated system that (a) continuously monitors global news, (b) is able to autonomously identify and characterize risks, (c) is able to determine the proximity of reaching triggers to determine the distance from the manifestation of the risk impact and (d) identifies organization's operational areas that may be most impacted by the risk. Other contributions also include: (a) a knowledge graph representation of risks and (b) relevant news matching to risks identified by the organization utilizing a neural embedding model to match the textual description of a given risk with multi-lingual news.

Tucker Tensor Layer in Fully Connected Neural Networks

We introduce the Tucker Tensor Layer (TTL), an alternative to the dense weight-matrices of the fully connected layers of feed-forward neural networks (NNs), to answer the long standing quest to compress NNs and improve their interpretability. This is achieved by treating these weight-matrices as the unfolding of a higher order weight-tensor. This enables us to introduce a framework for exploiting the multi-way nature of the weight-tensor in order to efficiently reduce the number of parameters, by virtue of the compression properties of tensor decompositions. The Tucker Decomposition (TKD) is employed to decompose the weight-tensor into a core tensor and factor matrices. We re-derive back-propagation within this framework, by extending the notion of matrix derivatives to tensors. In this way, the physical interpretability of the TKD is exploited to gain insights into training, through the process of computing gradients with respect to each factor matrix. The proposed framework is validated on synthetic data and on the Fashion-MNIST dataset, emphasizing the relative importance of various data features in training, hence mitigating the "black-box" issue inherent to NNs. Experiments on both MNIST and Fashion-MNIST illustrate the compression properties of the TTL, achieving a 66.63 fold compression whilst maintaining comparable performance to the uncompressed NN.