Machine Learning and AI in Finance


Book Description

The significant amount of information available in any field requires a systematic and analytical approach to select the most critical information and anticipate major events. During the last decade, the world has witnessed a rapid expansion of applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to an increasingly broad range of financial markets and problems. Machine learning and AI algorithms facilitate this process understanding, modelling and forecasting the behaviour of the most relevant financial variables. The main contribution of this book is the presentation of new theoretical and applied AI perspectives to find solutions to unsolved finance questions. This volume proposes an optimal model for the volatility smile, for modelling high-frequency liquidity demand and supply and for the simulation of market microstructure features. Other new AI developments explored in this book includes building a universal model for a large number of stocks, developing predictive models based on the average price of the crowd, forecasting the stock price using the attention mechanism in a neural network, clustering multivariate time series into different market states, proposing a multivariate distance nonlinear causality test and filtering out false investment strategies with an unsupervised learning algorithm. Machine Learning and AI in Finance explores the most recent advances in the application of innovative machine learning and artificial intelligence models to predict financial time series, to simulate the structure of the financial markets, to explore nonlinear causality models, to test investment strategies and to price financial options. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Quantitative Finance journal.




Landscape Ecological Analysis


Book Description

Growth in the field of landscape ecology has included the development of methods and results that can be applied to an impressive range of environmental issues. This book addresses a broad spectrum of political, theoretical and applied aspects that often arise in the design and execution of landscape studies. The concepts of geographical scale and hierarchy arising within the confines of landscape ecology are examined, and a series of techniques are presented to address problems in spatial and temporal analysis. This book will provide the reader with a current perspective on this rapidly evolving science.







Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data, second edition


Book Description

The second edition of a comprehensive state-of-the-art graduate level text on microeconometric methods, substantially revised and updated. The second edition of this acclaimed graduate text provides a unified treatment of two methods used in contemporary econometric research, cross section and data panel methods. By focusing on assumptions that can be given behavioral content, the book maintains an appropriate level of rigor while emphasizing intuitive thinking. The analysis covers both linear and nonlinear models, including models with dynamics and/or individual heterogeneity. In addition to general estimation frameworks (particular methods of moments and maximum likelihood), specific linear and nonlinear methods are covered in detail, including probit and logit models and their multivariate, Tobit models, models for count data, censored and missing data schemes, causal (or treatment) effects, and duration analysis. Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data was the first graduate econometrics text to focus on microeconomic data structures, allowing assumptions to be separated into population and sampling assumptions. This second edition has been substantially updated and revised. Improvements include a broader class of models for missing data problems; more detailed treatment of cluster problems, an important topic for empirical researchers; expanded discussion of "generalized instrumental variables" (GIV) estimation; new coverage (based on the author's own recent research) of inverse probability weighting; a more complete framework for estimating treatment effects with panel data, and a firmly established link between econometric approaches to nonlinear panel data and the "generalized estimating equation" literature popular in statistics and other fields. New attention is given to explaining when particular econometric methods can be applied; the goal is not only to tell readers what does work, but why certain "obvious" procedures do not. The numerous included exercises, both theoretical and computer-based, allow the reader to extend methods covered in the text and discover new insights.




Applied Multivariate Research


Book Description

For me the comprehensive nature of the text is most important - even when I don't cover topics in class students gain value by being able to read about cluster analysis or ROC analysis in enough detail that they can conduct their own analyses. Students appreciate the integration with SPSS. There is an appropriate balance of "practice" and background so that students learn what they need to know about the techniques but also learn how to implement and interpret the analysis.




Elements of Causal Inference


Book Description

A concise and self-contained introduction to causal inference, increasingly important in data science and machine learning. The mathematization of causality is a relatively recent development, and has become increasingly important in data science and machine learning. This book offers a self-contained and concise introduction to causal models and how to learn them from data. After explaining the need for causal models and discussing some of the principles underlying causal inference, the book teaches readers how to use causal models: how to compute intervention distributions, how to infer causal models from observational and interventional data, and how causal ideas could be exploited for classical machine learning problems. All of these topics are discussed first in terms of two variables and then in the more general multivariate case. The bivariate case turns out to be a particularly hard problem for causal learning because there are no conditional independences as used by classical methods for solving multivariate cases. The authors consider analyzing statistical asymmetries between cause and effect to be highly instructive, and they report on their decade of intensive research into this problem. The book is accessible to readers with a background in machine learning or statistics, and can be used in graduate courses or as a reference for researchers. The text includes code snippets that can be copied and pasted, exercises, and an appendix with a summary of the most important technical concepts.




Causality in Time Series: Challenges in Machine Learning


Book Description

This volume in the Challenges in Machine Learning series gathers papers from the Mini Symposium on Causality in Time Series, which was part of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) confernce in 2009 in Vancouver, Canada. These papers present state-of-the-art research in time-series causality to the machine learning community, unifying methodological interests in the various communities that require such inference.




Doing Research in Political Science


Book Description

This is an immensely helpful book for students starting their own research... an excellent introduction to the comparative method giving an authoritative overview over the research process - Klaus Armingeon, University of Bern Doing Research in Political Science is the book for mastering the comparative method in all the social sciences - Jan-Erik Lane, University of Geneva This book has established itself as a concise and well-readable text on comparative methods and statistics in political science I...strongly recommend it. - Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Philipps-University Marburg This thoroughly revised edition of the popular textbook offers an accessible but comprehensive introduction to comparative research methods and statistics for students of political science. Clearly organized around three parts, the text introduces the main theories and methodologies used in the discipline. Part 1 frames the comparative approach within the methodological framework of the political and social sciences. Part 2 introduces basic descriptive and inferential statistical methods as well as more advanced multivariate methods used in quantitative political analysis. Part 3 applies the methods and techniques of Parts 1 & 2 to research questions drawn from contemporary themes and issues in political science. Incorporating practice exercises, ideas for further reading and summary questions throughout, Doing Research in Political Science provides an invaluable step-by-step guide for students and researchers in political science, comparative politics and empirical political analysis.




Structural Vector Autoregressive Analysis


Book Description

This book discusses the econometric foundations of structural vector autoregressive modeling, as used in empirical macroeconomics, finance, and related fields.




Modelling Nonlinear Economic Time Series


Book Description

This book contains an extensive up-to-date overview of nonlinear time series models and their application to modelling economic relationships. It considers nonlinear models in stationary and nonstationary frameworks, and both parametric and nonparametric models are discussed. The book contains examples of nonlinear models in economic theory and presents the most common nonlinear time series models. Importantly, it shows the reader how to apply these models in practice. For thispurpose, the building of various nonlinear models with its three stages of model building: specification, estimation and evaluation, is discussed in detail and is illustrated by several examples involving both economic and non-economic data. Since estimation of nonlinear time series models is carried outusing numerical algorithms, the book contains a chapter on estimating parametric nonlinear models and another on estimating nonparametric ones.Forecasting is a major reason for building time series models, linear or nonlinear. The book contains a discussion on forecasting with nonlinear models, both parametric and nonparametric, and considers numerical techniques necessary for computing multi-period forecasts from them. The main focus of the book is on models of the conditional mean, but models of the conditional variance, mainly those of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity, receive attention as well. A separate chapter isdevoted to state space models. As a whole, the book is an indispensable tool for researchers interested in nonlinear time series and is also suitable for teaching courses in econometrics and time series analysis.