Deep Learning for Portfolio Optimisation

We adopt deep learning models to directly optimise the portfolio Sharpe ratio. The framework we present circumvents the requirements for forecasting expected returns and allows us to directly optimise portfolio weights by updating model parameters. Instead of selecting individual assets, we trade Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) of market indices to form a portfolio. Indices of different asset classes show robust correlations and trading them substantially reduces the spectrum of available assets to choose from. We compare our method with a wide range of algorithms with results showing that our model obtains the best performance over the testing period, from 2011 to the end of April 2020, including the financial instabilities of the first quarter of 2020. A sensitivity analysis is included to understand the relevance of input features and we further study the performance of our approach under different cost rates and different risk levels via volatility scaling.

VIGN: Variational Integrator Graph Networks

Rich, physically-informed inductive biases play an imperative role in accurately modelling the time dynamics of physical systems. In this paper, we introduce Variational Integrator Graph Networks (VIGNs), the first approach to combine a Variational Integrator (VI) inductive bias with a Graph Network (GN) and demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in performance, both in terms of data-efficient learning and predictive accuracy, over existing methods. We show that this improvement arises because VIs induce coupled learning of generalized position and momentum updates which can be formulated as a Partitioned Runge-Kutta (PRK) method. We empirically establish that VIGN outperforms numerous methods in learning from existing datasets with noise.

Mixture Density Conditional Generative Adversarial Network Models (MD-CGAN)

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gained significant attention in recent years, with particularly impressive applications highlighted in computer vision. In this work, we present a Mixture Density Conditional Generative Adversarial Model (MD-CGAN), where the generator is a Gaussian mixture model, with a focus on time series forecasting. Compared to examples in vision, there have been more limited applications of GAN models to time series. We show that our model is capable of estimating a probabilistic posterior distribution over forecasts and that, in comparison to a set of benchmark methods, the MD-CGAN model performs well, particularly in situations where noise is a significant in the time series. Further, by using a Gaussian mixture model that allows for a flexible number of mixture coefficients, the MD-CGAN offers posterior distributions that are non-Gaussian.

Iterate Averaging Helps: An Alternative Perspective in Deep Learning

Iterate averaging has a rich history in optimisation, but has only very recently been popularised in deep learning. We investigate its effects in a deep learning context, and argue that previous explanations on its efficacy, which place a high importance on the local geometry (flatness vs sharpness) of final solutions, are not necessarily relevant. We instead argue that the robustness of iterate averaging towards the typically very high estimation noise in deep learning and the various regularisation effects averaging exert, are the key reasons for the performance gain, indeed this effect is made even more prominent due to the over-parameterisation of modern networks. Inspired by this, we propose Gadam, which combines Adam with iterate averaging to address one of key problems of adaptive optimisers that they often generalise worse. Without compromising adaptivity and with minimal additional computational burden, we show that Gadam (and its variant GadamX) achieve a generalisation performance that is consistently superior to tuned SGD and is even on par or better compared to SGD with iterate averaging on various image classification (CIFAR 10/100 and ImageNet 32$\times$32) and language tasks (PTB).

Learning Bijective Feature Maps for Linear ICA

Separating high-dimensional data like images into independent latent factors remains an open research problem. Here we develop a method that jointly learns a linear independent component analysis (ICA) model with non-linear bijective feature maps. By combining these two methods, ICA can learn interpretable latent structure for images. For non-square ICA, where we assume the number of sources is less than the dimensionality of data, we achieve better unsupervised latent factor discovery than flow-based models and linear ICA. This performance scales to large image datasets such as CelebA.

HumBug Zooniverse: a crowd-sourced acoustic mosquito dataset

Mosquitoes are the only known vector of malaria, which leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Understanding the number and location of potential mosquito vectors is of paramount importance to aid the reduction of malaria transmission cases. In recent years, deep learning has become widely used for bioacoustic classification tasks. In order to enable further research applications in this field, we release a new dataset of mosquito audio recordings. With over a thousand contributors, we obtained 195,434 labels of two second duration, of which approximately 10 percent signify mosquito events. We present an example use of the dataset, in which we train a convolutional neural network on log-Mel features, showcasing the information content of the labels. We hope this will become a vital resource for those researching all aspects of malaria, and add to the existing audio datasets for bioacoustic detection and signal processing.

Ready Policy One: World Building Through Active Learning

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) offers a promising direction for sample efficient learning, often achieving state of the art results for continuous control tasks. However, many existing MBRL methods rely on combining greedy policies with exploration heuristics, and even those which utilize principled exploration bonuses construct dual objectives in an ad hoc fashion. In this paper we introduce Ready Policy One (RP1), a framework that views MBRL as an active learning problem, where we aim to improve the world model in the fewest samples possible. RP1 achieves this by utilizing a hybrid objective function, which crucially adapts during optimization, allowing the algorithm to trade off reward v.s. exploration at different stages of learning. In addition, we introduce a principled mechanism to terminate sample collection once we have a rich enough trajectory batch to improve the model. We rigorously evaluate our method on a variety of continuous control tasks, and demonstrate statistically significant gains over existing approaches.

One-Shot Bayes Opt with Probabilistic Population Based Training

Selecting optimal hyperparameters is a key challenge in machine learning. An exciting recent result showed it is possible to learn high-performing hyperparameter schedules on the fly in a single training run through methods inspired by Evolutionary Algorithms. These approaches have been shown to increase performance across a wide variety of machine learning tasks, ranging from supervised (SL) to reinforcement learning (RL). However, since they remain primarily evolutionary, they act in a greedy fashion, thus require a combination of vast computational resources and carefully selected meta-parameters to effectively explore the hyperparameter space. To address these shortcomings we look to Bayesian Optimization (BO), where a Gaussian Process surrogate model is combined with an acquisition function to produce a principled mechanism to trade off exploration vs exploitation. Our approach, which we call Probabilistic Population-Based Training ($\mathrm{P2BT}$), is able to transfer sample efficiency of BO to the online setting, making it possible to achieve these traits in a single training run. We show that $\mathrm{P2BT}$ is able to achieve high performance with only a small population size, making it useful for all researchers regardless of their computational resources.

Effective Diversity in Population-Based Reinforcement Learning

Maintaining a population of solutions has been shown to increase exploration in reinforcement learning, typically attributed to the greater diversity of behaviors considered. One such class of methods, novelty search, considers further boosting diversity across agents via a multi-objective optimization formulation. Despite the intuitive appeal, these mechanisms have several shortcomings. First, they make use of mean field updates, which induce cycling behaviors. Second, they often rely on handcrafted behavior characterizations, which require domain knowledge. Furthermore, boosting diversity often has a detrimental impact on optimizing already fruitful behaviors for rewards. Setting the relative importance of novelty- versus reward-factor is usually hardcoded or requires tedious tuning/annealing. In this paper, we introduce a novel measure of population-wide diversity, leveraging ideas from Determinantal Point Processes. We combine this in a principled fashion with the reward function to adapt to the degree of diversity during training, borrowing ideas from online learning. Combined with task-agnostic behavioral embeddings, we show this approach outperforms previous methods for multi-objective optimization, as well as vanilla algorithms solely optimizing for rewards.

Detecting Changes in Asset Co-Movement Using the Autoencoder Reconstruction Ratio

Detecting changes in asset co-movements is of much importance to financial practitioners, with numerous risk management benefits arising from the timely detection of breakdowns in historical correlations. In this article, we propose a real-time indicator to detect temporary increases in asset co-movements, the Autoencoder Reconstruction Ratio, which measures how well a basket of asset returns can be modelled using a lower-dimensional set of latent variables. The ARR uses a deep sparse denoising autoencoder to perform the dimensionality reduction on the returns vector, which replaces the PCA approach of the standard Absorption Ratio, and provides a better model for non-Gaussian returns. Through a systemic risk application on forecasting on the CRSP US Total Market Index, we show that lower ARR values coincide with higher volatility and larger drawdowns, indicating that increased asset co-movement does correspond with periods of market weakness. We also demonstrate that short-term (i.e. 5-min and 1-hour) predictors for realised volatility and market crashes can be improved by including additional ARR inputs.