Financial Signal Processing and Machine Learning

Chapter 1OverviewFinancial Signal Processing and Machine Learning

Ali N. Akansu¹, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni² and Dmitry Malioutov³

¹New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA

²Princeton University, USA

³IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

1.1 Introduction

In the last decade, we have seen dramatic growth in applications for signal-processing and machine-learning techniques in many enterprise and industrial settings. Advertising, real estate, healthcare, e-commerce, and many other industries have been radically transformed by new processes and practices relying on collecting and analyzing data about operations, customers, competitors, new opportunities, and other aspects of business. The financial industry has been one of the early adopters, with a long history of applying sophisticated methods and models to analyze relevant data and make intelligent decisions – ranging from the quadratic programming formulation in Markowitz portfolio selection (Markowitz, 1952), factor analysis for equity modeling (Fama and French, 1993), stochastic differential equations for option pricing (Black and Scholes, 1973), stochastic volatility models in risk management (Engle, 1982; Hull and White, 1987), reinforcement learning for optimal trade execution (Bertsimas and Lo, 1998), and many other examples. While there is a great deal of overlap among techniques in machine learning, signal processing and financial econometrics, historically, there has been rather limited awareness and slow permeation of new ...