Meta-Learning of Evolutionary Strategy for Stock Trading

Abstract

Meta-learning algorithms learn about the learning process itself so it can speed up subsequent similar learning tasks with fewer data and iterations. If achieved, these benefits expand the flexibility of traditional machine learning to areas where there are small windows of time or data available. One such area is stock trading, where the relevance of data decreases as time passes, requiring fast results on fewer data points to respond to fast-changing market trends. We, to the best of our knowledge, are the first to apply meta-learning algorithms to an evolutionary strategy for stock trading to decrease learning time by using fewer iterations and to achieve higher trading profits with fewer data points. We found that our meta-learning approach to stock trading earns profits similar to a purely evolutionary algorithm. However, it only requires 50 iterations during test, versus thousands that are typically required without meta-learning, or 50% of the training data during test.