Synergistic Formulaic Alpha Generation for Quantitative Trading based on Reinforcement Learning

Mining of formulaic alpha factors refers to the process of discovering and developing specific factors or indicators (referred to as alpha factors) for quantitative trading in stock market. To efficiently discover alpha factors in vast search space, reinforcement learning (RL) is commonly employed. This paper proposes a method to enhance existing alpha factor mining approaches by expanding a search space and utilizing pretrained formulaic alpha set as initial seed values to generate synergistic formulaic alpha. We employ information coefficient (IC) and rank information coefficient (Rank IC) as performance evaluation metrics for the model. Using CSI300 market data, we conducted real investment simulations and observed significant performance improvement compared to existing techniques.

Lamina-specific neuronal properties promote robust, stable signal propagation in feedforward networks

Feedforward networks (FFN) are ubiquitous structures in neural systems and have been studied to understand mechanisms of reliable signal and information transmission. In many FFNs, neurons in one layer have intrinsic properties that are distinct from those in their pre-/postsynaptic layers, but how this affects network-level information processing remains unexplored. Here we show that layer-to-layer heterogeneity arising from lamina-specific cellular properties facilitates signal and information transmission in FFNs. Specifically, we found that signal transformations, made by each layer of neurons on an input-driven spike signal, demodulate signal distortions introduced by preceding layers. This mechanism boosts information transfer carried by a propagating spike signal and thereby supports reliable spike signal and information transmission in a deep FFN. Our study suggests that distinct cell types in neural circuits, performing different computational functions, facilitate information processing on the whole.