Update on Recent Work

It has been almost two months since my last post and during this time I have been working on a few different things, all related in one way or another to my desire to create a rolling NN training regime. First off, I have been giving some thought as to the exact methodology to use, and two had come to mind

1. a rolling look back period of n bars, similar to a moving average
2. selecting non consecutive periods of price history with similarity to the most recent history

I have not done any work on the first because I feel that it might lead to an unbalanced training set, so I have been working on the second idea. It seemed natural to revisit my earlier work on market classifying with the idea of training a NN for the current market regime using the most recent n bars that have the same market regime classification as the current bar. However, having been somewhat disappointed with the results of my previous work in  this area I have been looking at SVM classifiers, in particular the libsvm library. To facilitate this, and following on from my previous post where I mentioned the comp engine timeseries website, I have been hand engineering features for inputs to the SVM. Below is a short video which shows the four features I have come up with. The x and y axis are the same two features in both parts of the video, with the z axis being the third and fourth features. The data are those obtained from my usual idealised market types, with added noise to try and simulate more realistic market conditions. The different colours indicate the five market types that are being modelled.

Non-embedded view

As can be seen there is nice separation between the market types and the SVM achieves over 98% cross-validation accuracy on this training set. Despite this,  when applied to real market data I am yet again disappointed by the performance and choose for now to no longer pursue this avenue of investigation.

In addition to all the above, I have "discovered" the Octave sourceforge nan package, which I may begin to investigate more fully in due course. I have also been working through another Massive Open Online Course, this time Statistical Learning, which is in its last week at the moment. In this last week of the course I have been alerted to a possible new area of investigation, Distance correlation, which I had heard of before but not fully appreciated.

Finally, I have also been reassessing the code I use for calculating dominant cycle periods. It is these last two, distance correlation and the period code, that I'm going to look at more fully over the coming days.