Data Science
Machine learning & data science for beginners and experts alike.
This is an excerpt from the book Machine Learning for Finance written by Jannes Klaas. This book explores new advances in machine learning and shows how they can be applied in the financial sector. It explains the concepts and algorithms behind the main machine learning techniques and provides example Python code for implementing the models yourself. In this article, we’ll define what machine learning is and what are the different types of machine learning.
The financial services industry is fundamentally an information processing industry. An investment fund processes information in order to evaluate investments, an insurance company processes information to price their insurances, while a retail bank will process information in order to decide which products to offer to which customers. It is, therefore, no accident that the financial industry was an early adopter of computers.
The first stock ticker was the printing telegraph, which was invented back in 1867. The first mechanical adding machine, which was directly targeted at the finance industry, was patented in 1885. Then in 1971, the automatic teller banking machine, which allowed customers to withdraw cash using a plastic card, was patented. That same year, the first electronic stock exchange, the NASDAQ, opened its doors, and 11 years later, in 1982, the first Bloomberg Terminal was installed. The reason for the happy marriage between the finance sector and computers is that success in the industry, especially in investing, is often tied to you having an information advantage.
In the early days of Wall Street, the legends of the gilded age made brazen use of private information. Jay Gould, for example, one of the richest men of his time, placed a mole inside the US government. The mole was to give notice of government gold sales and through that, tried to influence President Ulysses S. Grant as well as his secretary. Toward the end of the 1930s, the SEC and CFTC stood between investors and such information advantages.
As information advantages ceased to be a reliable source of above-market performance, clever financial modeling took its place. The term hedge fund was coined back in 1949, the Harry Markowitz model was published in 1953, and in 1973, the Black-Scholes formula was first published. Since then, the field has made much progress and has developed a wide range of financial products. However, as knowledge of these models becomes more widespread, the returns on using them diminish.
When we look at the financial industry coupled with modern computing, it's clear that the information advantage is back. This time not in the form of insider information and sleazy deals, but instead is coming from an automated analysis of the vast amount of public information that's out there.
Today's fund managers have access to more information than their forbearers could ever dream of. However, this is not useful on its own. For example, let's look at news reports. You can get them via the internet and they are easy to access, but to make use of them, a computer would have to read, understand, and contextualize them. The computer would have to know which company an article is about, whether it is good news or bad news that's being reported, and whether we can learn something about the relationship between this company and another company mentioned in the article. Those are just a couple of examples of contextualizing the story. Firms that master sourcing such alternative data, as it is often called, will often have an advantage.
But it does not stop there. Financial professionals are expensive people who frequently make six- to seven-figure salaries and occupy office space in some of the most expensive real estate in the world. This is justified as many financial professionals are smart, well-educated, and hard-working people that are scarce and for which there is a high demand. Because of this, it's thus in the interest of any company to maximize the productivity of these individuals. By getting more bang for the buck from the best employees, they will allow companies to offer their products cheaper or in greater variety.
Passive investing through exchange-traded funds, for instance, requires little management for large sums of money. Fees for passive investment vehicles, such as funds that just mirror the S&P 500, are often well below one percent. But with the rise of modern computing technology, firms are now able to increase the productivity of their money managers and thus reduce their fees to stay competitive.
What is machine learning?
"Machine learning is the subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed."
- Arthur Samuel, 1959
What do we mean by machine learning? Most computer programs today are handcrafted by humans. Software engineers carefully craft every rule that governs how software behaves and then translate it into computer code.
If you are reading this as an eBook, take a look at your screen right now. Everything that you see appears there because of some rule that a software engineer somewhere crafted. This approach has gotten us quite far, but that's not to say there are no limits to it. Sometimes, there might just be too many rules for humans to write. We might not be able to think of rules since they are too complex for even the smartest developers to come up with.
As a brief exercise, take a minute to come up with a list of rules that describe all dogs, but clearly distinguish dogs from all other animals. Fur? Well, cats have fur, too. What about a dog wearing a jacket? That is still a dog, just in a jacket. Researchers have spent years trying to craft these rules, but they've had very little success.
Humans don't seem to be able to perfectly tell why something is a dog, but they know a dog when they see a dog. As a species, we seem to detect specific, hard-to-describe patterns that, in aggregate, let us classify an animal as a dog. Machine learning attempts to do the same. Instead of handcrafting rules, we let a computer develop its own rules through pattern detection.
There are different ways this can work, and we're now going to look at three different types of learning: supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.
Supervised learning
Let's go back to our dog classifier. There are in fact many such classifiers currently in use today. If you use Google images, for example, and search for "dog," it will use an image classifier to show you pictures of dogs. These classifiers are trained under a paradigm known as supervised learning.
In supervised learning, we have a large number of training examples, such as images of animals, and labels that describe what the expected outcome for those training examples is. For example, the preceding figure would come with the label "dog," while an image of a cat would come with a label "not a dog."
If we have a high number of these labeled training examples, we can train a classifier on detecting the subtle statistical patterns that differentiate dogs from all other animals.
Note: The classifier does not know what a dog fundamentally is. It only knows the statistical patterns that linked images to dogs in training.
If a supervised learning classifier encounters something that's very different from the training data, it can often get confused and will just output nonsense.
Unsupervised learning
While supervised learning has made great advances over the last few years, most of this book will focus on working with labeled examples. However, sometimes we may not have labels. In this case, we can still use machine learning to find hidden patterns in data.
Imagine a company that has a number of customers for its products. These customers can probably be grouped into different market segments, but what we don't know is what the different market segments are. We also cannot ask customers which market segment they belong to because they probably don't know. Which market segment of the shampoo market are you? Do you even know how shampoo firms segment their customers?
In this example, we would like an algorithm that looks at a lot of data from customers and groups them into segments. This is an example of unsupervised learning.
This area of machine learning is far less developed than supervised learning, but it still holds great potential.
Reinforcement learning
In reinforcement learning, we train agents who take actions in an environment, such as a self-driving car on the road. While we do not have labels, that is, we cannot tell what the correct action is in any situation, we can assign rewards or punishments. For example, we could reward keeping a proper distance from the car in front.
A driving instructor does not tell the student to "push the brake halfway down while moving the steering wheel two degrees to the right," but rather they tell the student whether they are doing well or not, while the student figures out the exact amount of brakes to use.
Reinforcement learning has also made some remarkable progress in the past couple of years and is considered by many to be a promising avenue toward general artificial intelligence, that being computers that are as smart as humans.
The unreasonable effectiveness of data
In 2009, three Google engineers published a landmark paper titled The unreasonable effectiveness of data. In the paper, they described how relatively simple machine learning systems that had been around for a long time had exhibited much better performance when fed with the enormous amounts of data Google had on its servers. In fact, they discovered that when fed with more data, these simple systems could master tasks that had been thought to be impossible before.
From there, researchers quickly started revisiting old machine learning technologies and found that artificial neural networks did especially well when trained on massive datasets. This was around the same time that computing power became cheap and plentiful enough to train much bigger networks than before.
These bigger artificial neural networks were so effective that they got a name: deep neural networks, or deep learning. Deep neural networks are especially good at pattern detection. They can find complex patterns, such as the statistical pattern of light and dark that describes a face in a picture, and they can do so automatically given enough data.
Machine learning is, therefore, best understood as a paradigm change in how we program computers. Instead of carefully handcrafting rules, we feed the computer vast amounts of information and train it to craft the rules by itself.
This approach is superior if there is a very large number of rules, or even if these rules are difficult to describe. Modern machine learning is, therefore, the ideal tool for combing through the huge amounts of data the financial industry is confronted with.
All models are wrong
There is a saying in statistics that all models are wrong, but some are useful. Machine learning creates incredibly complex statistical models that are often, for example, in deep learning, not interpretable to humans. They sure are useful and have great value, but they are still wrong. This is because they are complex black boxes, and people tend to not question machine learning models, even though they should question them precisely because they are black boxes.
There will come a time when even the most sophisticated deep neural network will make a fundamentally wrong prediction, just as the advanced Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) models did in the financial crises of 2008. Even worse, black box machine learning models, which will make millions of decisions on loan approval or insurance, impacting everyday people's lives, will eventually make wrong decisions.
Sometimes they will be biased. Machine learning is ever only as good as the data that we feed it, data that can often be biased in what it's showing, something we'll consider later on in this chapter. This is something we must pay a lot of time in addressing, as if we mindlessly deploy these algorithms, we will automate discrimination too, which has the possibility of causing another financial crisis.
This is especially true in the financial industry, where algorithms can often have a severe impact on people's lives while at the same time being kept secret. The unquestionable, secret black boxes that gain their acceptance through the heavy use of math pose a much bigger threat to society than the self-aware artificial intelligence taking over the world that you see in movies.
While this is not an ethics book, it makes sense for any practitioner of the field to get familiar with the ethical implications of his or her work. In addition to recommending that you read Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of math destruction, it's also worth asking you to swear The Modelers Hippocratic Oath. The oath was developed by Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott, two quantitative finance researchers, in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis:
"I will remember that I didn't make the world, and it doesn't satisfy my equations. Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics. I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so. Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights. I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension."
In recent years, machine learning has made a number of great strides, with researchers mastering tasks that were previously seen as unsolvable. From identifying objects in images to transcribing voice and playing complex board games like Go, modern machine learning has matched, and continues to match and even beat, human performance at a dazzling range of tasks.
Interestingly, deep learning is the method behind all these advances. In fact, the bulk of advances come from a subfield of deep learning called deep neural networks. While many practitioners are familiar with standard econometric models, such as regression, few are familiar with this new breed of modeling.
Explore advances in machine learning and how to put them to work in financial industries with the book Machine Learning for Finance, by Jannes Klaas.
About the author
Jannes Klaas is a quantitative researcher with a background in economics and finance. He taught machine learning for finance as lead developer for machine learning at the Turing Society, Rotterdam. He has led machine learning bootcamps and worked with financial companies on data-driven applications and trading strategies.
Jannes is currently a graduate student at Oxford University with active research interests including systemic risk and large-scale automated knowledge discovery.
