{"title":"Machine learning private equity returns","authors":"Christian Tausch, Marcus Pietz","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100141","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100141","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we use two machine learning techniques to learn the aggregated return time series of complete private capital fund segments. First, we propose Stochastic Discount Factor (SDF) model combination to determine the public factor exposure of private equity. Here, we describe our theoretical motivation to favor model combination over model selection. This entails that we apply simple coefficient averaging to obtain multivariate SDF models that mimic the factor exposure of all major private capital fund types. As a second step, we suggest componentwise <em>L</em><sub>2</sub> boosting to estimate the error-term time series associated with our factor models. The simple addition of the public factor model returns and the error terms then yields the total return time series. These return time series can be applied for proper integrated public and private risk management or benchmarking.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142538739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corrigendum to “Topological tail dependence: evidence from forecasting realized volatility” [The Journal of Finance and Data Science 9 (2023) 100107]","authors":"Hugo Gobato Souto","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100135","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100135","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141404142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deep unsupervised anomaly detection in high-frequency markets","authors":"Cédric Poutré , Didier Chételat , Manuel Morales","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100129","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Inspired by recent advances in the deep learning literature, this article introduces a novel hybrid anomaly detection framework specifically designed for limit order book (LOB) data. A modified Transformer autoencoder architecture is proposed to learn rich temporal LOB subsequence representations, which eases the separability of normal and fraudulent time series. A dissimilarity function is then learned in the representation space to characterize normal LOB behavior, enabling the detection of any anomalous subsequences out-of-sample. We also develop a complete trade-based manipulation simulation methodology able to generate a variety of scenarios derived from actual trade–based fraud cases. The complete framework is tested on LOB data of five NASDAQ stocks in which we randomly insert synthetic quote stuffing, layering, and pump-and-dump manipulations. We show that the proposed asset-independent approach achieves new state-of-the-art fraud detection performance, without requiring any prior knowledge of manipulation patterns.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240591882400014X/pdfft?md5=438a8d321f83d33f31a8f9a74e366e8e&pid=1-s2.0-S240591882400014X-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140807851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Overlooked biases from misidentifications of causal structures","authors":"Simone Cenci","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100127","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Testing theories and explaining phenomena in empirical finance often requires estimating causal effects from observational data. In this note, we argue that some of the standard practices to address endogeneity concerns in regression-based estimation approaches can, when not correctly implemented and their results not appropriately interpreted, generate additional, often overlooked, problems. We identify three main systemic issues in empirical finance, provide theoretical and numerical examples to illustrate and support our arguments, and propose solutions to overcome these limitations. Overall, we suggest that these issues are caused by a systematic underestimation of the importance of robust ex-ante identification, and interpretation, of causal structures in empirical studies in finance.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"10 ","pages":"Article 100127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405918824000126/pdfft?md5=9a7e5f1ee2e1cfae809f6e4fd338d7cf&pid=1-s2.0-S2405918824000126-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140162974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Huining (Henry) Cao, Xiaoyan Zhang, Yi Huang, Yiping Huang, Bernard Yeung
{"title":"Fintech, financial inclusion, digital currency, and CBDC","authors":"Huining (Henry) Cao, Xiaoyan Zhang, Yi Huang, Yiping Huang, Bernard Yeung","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100115","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jfds.2024.100115","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405918824000011/pdfft?md5=3ec6a5ae01b92dc8eb68df1265a77962&pid=1-s2.0-S2405918824000011-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139395799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nolan Alexander , William Scherer , Jamey Thompson
{"title":"Asset allocation using a Markov process of clustered efficient frontier coefficients states","authors":"Nolan Alexander , William Scherer , Jamey Thompson","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100110","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100110","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We propose a novel asset allocation model using a Markov process of states defined by clustered efficient frontier coefficients. While most research in Markov models of the market characterize regimes using return and volatility, we instead propose characterizing these states using efficient frontiers, which provide more information on the interactions of underlying assets that comprise the market. Efficient frontiers can be decomposed to their functional form, a square-root second-order polynomial defined by three coefficients, to provide a dimensionality reduction of the return vector and covariance matrix. Each month, the proposed model hierarchically clusters the monthly coefficients data up to the current month, to characterize the market states, then defines a Markov process on the sequence of states. To incorporate these states into portfolio optimization, for each state, we calculate the tangency portfolio using only return data in that state. We then take the expectation of these weights for each state, weighted by the probability of transitioning from the current state to each state. To empirically validate our proposed model, we employ three sets of assets that span the market, and show that our proposed model significantly outperforms benchmark portfolios.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405918823000260/pdfft?md5=11224414382844d224bb072b3978b6e7&pid=1-s2.0-S2405918823000260-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CentralBankRoBERTa: A fine-tuned large language model for central bank communications","authors":"Moritz Pfeifer , Vincent P. Marohl","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100114","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100114","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Central bank communications are an important tool for guiding the economy and fulfilling monetary policy goals. Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms have been used to analyze central bank communications. These outdated bag-of-words methods often ignore context and cannot distinguish who these sentiments are addressing. Recent research has introduced deep-learning-based NLP algorithms, also known as large language models (LLMs), which take context into account. This study applies LLMs to central bank communications and constructs CentralBankRoBERTa, a state-of-the-art economic agent classifier that distinguishes five basic macroeconomic agents and binary sentiment classifier that identifies the emotional content of sentences in central bank communications. The absence of large-language models in the central bank communications literature may be attributed to a lack of appropriately labeled datasets. To address this gap, we introduce our model, CentralBankRoBERTa, offering an easy-to-use and standardized tool for scholars of central bank communications.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100114"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405918823000302/pdfft?md5=f9ee367fba22f338380c708e9da5b5a4&pid=1-s2.0-S2405918823000302-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139012960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Loris Cannelli , Giuseppe Nuti , Marzio Sala , Oleg Szehr
{"title":"Hedging using reinforcement learning: Contextual k-armed bandit versus Q-learning","authors":"Loris Cannelli , Giuseppe Nuti , Marzio Sala , Oleg Szehr","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100101","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The construction of replication strategies for contingent claims in the presence of risk and market friction is a key problem of financial engineering. In real markets, continuous replication, such as in the model of Black, Scholes and Merton (BSM), is not only unrealistic but is also undesirable due to high transaction costs. A variety of methods have been proposed to balance between effective replication and losses in the incomplete market setting. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI-based hedgers have attracted considerable interest, where particular attention is given to Recurrent Neural Network systems and variations of the <em>Q</em>-learning algorithm. From a practical point of view, sufficient samples for training such an AI can only be obtained from a simulator of the market environment. Yet if an agent is trained solely on simulated data, the run-time performance will primarily reflect the accuracy of the simulation, which leads to the classical problem of model choice and calibration. In this article, the hedging problem is viewed as an instance of a risk-averse contextual <em>k</em>-armed bandit problem, which is motivated by the simplicity and sample-efficiency of the architecture, which allows for realistic online model updates from real-world data. We find that the <em>k</em>-armed bandit model naturally fits to the Profit and Loss formulation of hedging, providing for a more accurate and sample efficient approach than <em>Q</em>-learning and reducing to the Black-Scholes model in the absence of transaction costs and risks.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49903014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yiea-Funk Te , Michèle Wieland , Martin Frey , Asya Pyatigorskaya , Penny Schiffer , Helmut Grabner
{"title":"Making it into a successful series a funding: An analysis of Crunchbase and LinkedIn data","authors":"Yiea-Funk Te , Michèle Wieland , Martin Frey , Asya Pyatigorskaya , Penny Schiffer , Helmut Grabner","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100099","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Startups are a key force driving economic development, and the success of these high-risk ventures can bring huge profits to venture capital firms. The ability to predict the success of startups is a major advantage for investors to outperform their competitors. In this study, we explore the potential of using publicly available LinkedIn profiles as an alternative and complementary data source to Crunchbase for predicting startup success. We provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature on the factors that influence startup success to create a large set of features for predictive modeling. We train two models for predicting startup success employing light gradient boosting that use LinkedIn data as a standalone and as a complementary data source, and compare them to baseline models based on Crunchbase data. We show that using LinkedIn as a complementary data source yields the best result with a mean area under the curve (AUC) value of 84%. We also provide a thorough analysis of what types of information contribute most to modeling startup success using the Shapley value method. Our models and analysis can be used to develop a decision support system to facilitate startup screening and the due diligence process for venture capital firms.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100099"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49903015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An analysis of conditional mean-variance portfolio performance using hierarchical clustering","authors":"Stephen R. Owen","doi":"10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100112","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jfds.2023.100112","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper studies portfolio optimization through improvements of ex-ante conditional covariance estimates. We use the cross-section of stock returns over a 52-year sample to analyze trading performance by implementing the machine learning algorithm of hierarchical clustering. We find that higher out-of-sample risk-adjusted returns are achieved relative to the traditional Markowitz portfolio through hierarchical clustering using a 3-month buy-and-hold, long-only strategy. Additionally, the average change in portfolio weights at each rebalancing period is significantly lower for the portfolio formed using machine learning relative to Markowitz, decreasing investor trading costs. The results are robust to various settings and subsamples.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":36340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Finance and Data Science","volume":"9 ","pages":"Article 100112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405918823000284/pdfft?md5=f08cced7b32b9843b62604332db0b92a&pid=1-s2.0-S2405918823000284-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135714581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}