Bayesian Optimization

AutoQuant: An Auditable Expert-System Framework for Execution-Constrained Auto-Tuning in Cryptocurrency Perpetual Futures ArXiv ID: 2512.22476 “View on arXiv” Authors: Kaihong Deng Abstract Backtests of cryptocurrency perpetual futures are fragile when they ignore microstructure frictions and reuse evaluation windows during parameter search. We study four liquid perpetuals (BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, SOL/USDT, AVAX/USDT) and quantify how execution delay, funding, fees, and slippage can inflate reported performance. We introduce AutoQuant, an execution-centric, alpha-agnostic framework for auditable strategy configuration selection. AutoQuant encodes strict T+1 execution semantics and no-look-ahead funding alignment, runs Bayesian optimization under realistic costs, and applies a two-stage double-screening protocol across held-out rolling windows and a cost-sensitivity grid. We show that fee-only and zero-cost backtests can materially overestimate annualized returns relative to a fully costed configuration, and that double screening tends to reduce drawdowns under the same strict semantics even when returns are not higher. A CSCV/PBO diagnostic indicates substantial residual overfitting risk, motivating AutoQuant as validation and governance infrastructure rather than a claim of persistent alpha. Returns are reported for small-account simulations with linear trading costs and without market impact or capacity modeling. ...

Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Financial Portfolio Management ArXiv ID: 2512.14992 “View on arXiv” Authors: M. Coronado-Vaca Abstract DRL agents circumvent the issue of classic models in the sense that they do not make assumptions like the financial returns being normally distributed and are able to deal with any information like the ESG score if they are configured to gain a reward that makes an objective better. However, the performance of DRL agents has high variability and it is very sensible to the value of their hyperparameters. Bayesian optimization is a class of methods that are suited to the optimization of black-box functions, that is, functions whose analytical expression is unknown, are noisy and expensive to evaluate. The hyperparameter tuning problem of DRL algorithms perfectly suits this scenario. As training an agent just for one objective is a very expensive period, requiring millions of timesteps, instead of optimizing an objective being a mixture of a risk-performance metric and an ESG metric, we choose to separate the objective and solve the multi-objective scenario to obtain an optimal Pareto set of portfolios representing the best tradeoff between the Sharpe ratio and the ESG mean score of the portfolio and leaving to the investor the choice of the final portfolio. We conducted our experiments using environments encoded within the OpenAI Gym, adapted from the FinRL platform. The experiments are carried out in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the NASDAQ markets in terms of the Sharpe ratio achieved by the agent and the mean ESG score of the portfolio. We compare the performance of the obtained Pareto sets in hypervolume terms illustrating how portfolios are the best trade-off between the Sharpe ratio and mean ESG score. Also, we show the usefulness of our proposed methodology by comparing the obtained hypervolume with one achieved by a Random Search methodology on the DRL hyperparameter space. ...

Predicting Price Movements in High-Frequency Financial Data with Spiking Neural Networks ArXiv ID: 2512.05868 “View on arXiv” Authors: Brian Ezinwoke, Oliver Rhodes Abstract Modern high-frequency trading (HFT) environments are characterized by sudden price spikes that present both risk and opportunity, but conventional financial models often fail to capture the required fine temporal structure. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a biologically inspired framework well-suited to these challenges due to their natural ability to process discrete events and preserve millisecond-scale timing. This work investigates the application of SNNs to high-frequency price-spike forecasting, enhancing performance via robust hyperparameter tuning with Bayesian Optimization (BO). This work converts high-frequency stock data into spike trains and evaluates three architectures: an established unsupervised STDP-trained SNN, a novel SNN with explicit inhibitory competition, and a supervised backpropagation network. BO was driven by a novel objective, Penalized Spike Accuracy (PSA), designed to ensure a network’s predicted price spike rate aligns with the empirical rate of price events. Simulated trading demonstrated that models optimized with PSA consistently outperformed their Spike Accuracy (SA)-tuned counterparts and baselines. Specifically, the extended SNN model with PSA achieved the highest cumulative return (76.8%) in simple backtesting, significantly surpassing the supervised alternative (42.54% return). These results validate the potential of spiking networks, when robustly tuned with task-specific objectives, for effective price spike forecasting in HFT. ...

Improving Bayesian Optimization for Portfolio Management with an Adaptive Scheduling ArXiv ID: 2504.13529 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Existing black-box portfolio management systems are prevalent in the financial industry due to commercial and safety constraints, though their performance can fluctuate dramatically with changing market regimes. Evaluating these non-transparent systems is computationally expensive, as fixed budgets limit the number of possible observations. Therefore, achieving stable and sample-efficient optimization for these systems has become a critical challenge. This work presents a novel Bayesian optimization framework (TPE-AS) that improves search stability and efficiency for black-box portfolio models under these limited observation budgets. Standard Bayesian optimization, which solely maximizes expected return, can yield erratic search trajectories and misalign the surrogate model with the true objective, thereby wasting the limited evaluation budget. To mitigate these issues, we propose a weighted Lagrangian estimator that leverages an adaptive schedule and importance sampling. This estimator dynamically balances exploration and exploitation by incorporating both the maximization of model performance and the minimization of the variance of model observations. It guides the search from broad, performance-seeking exploration towards stable and desirable regions as the optimization progresses. Extensive experiments and ablation studies, which establish our proposed method as the primary approach and other configurations as baselines, demonstrate its effectiveness across four backtest settings with three distinct black-box portfolio management models. ...

Bayesian Optimization for CVaR-based portfolio optimization ArXiv ID: 2503.17737 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Optimal portfolio allocation is often formulated as a constrained risk problem, where one aims to minimize a risk measure subject to some performance constraints. This paper presents new Bayesian Optimization algorithms for such constrained minimization problems, seeking to minimize the conditional value-at-risk (a computationally intensive risk measure) under a minimum expected return constraint. The proposed algorithms utilize a new acquisition function, which drives sampling towards the optimal region. Additionally, a new two-stage procedure is developed, which significantly reduces the number of evaluations of the expensive-to-evaluate objective function. The proposed algorithm’s competitive performance is demonstrated through practical examples. ...

Gated recurrent neural network with TPE Bayesian optimization for enhancing stock index prediction accuracy ArXiv ID: 2406.02604 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract The recent advancement of deep learning architectures, neural networks, and the combination of abundant financial data and powerful computers are transforming finance, leading us to develop an advanced method for predicting future stock prices. However, the accessibility of investment and trading at everyone’s fingertips made the stock markets increasingly intricate and prone to volatility. The increased complexity and volatility of the stock market have driven demand for more models, which would effectively capture high volatility and non-linear behavior of the different stock prices. This study explored gated recurrent neural network (GRNN) algorithms such as LSTM (long short-term memory), GRU (gated recurrent unit), and hybrid models like GRU-LSTM, LSTM-GRU, with Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) Bayesian optimization for hyperparameter optimization (TPE-GRNN). The aim is to improve the prediction accuracy of the next day’s closing price of the NIFTY 50 index, a prominent Indian stock market index, using TPE-GRNN. A combination of eight influential factors is carefully chosen from fundamental stock data, technical indicators, crude oil price, and macroeconomic data to train the models for capturing the changes in the price of the index with the factors of the broader economy. Single-layer and multi-layer TPE-GRNN models have been developed. The models’ performance is evaluated using standard matrices like R2, MAPE, and RMSE. The analysis of models’ performance reveals the impact of feature selection and hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in enhancing stock index price prediction accuracy. The results show that the MAPE of our proposed TPE-LSTM method is the lowest (best) with respect to all the previous models for stock index price prediction. ...

Unlocking Profit Potential: Maximizing Returns with Bayesian Optimization of Supertrend Indicator Parameters ArXiv ID: 2405.14262 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper investigates the potential of Bayesian optimization (BO) to optimize the atr multiplier and atr period -the parameters of the Supertrend indicator for maximizing trading profits across diverse stock datasets. By employing BO, the thesis aims to automate the identification of optimal parameter settings, leading to a more data-driven and potentially more profitable trading strategy compared to relying on manually chosen parameters. The effectiveness of the BO-optimized Supertrend strategy will be evaluated through backtesting on a variety of stock datasets. ...

Some variation of COBRA in sequential learning setup ArXiv ID: 2405.04539 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This research paper introduces innovative approaches for multivariate time series forecasting based on different variations of the combined regression strategy. We use specific data preprocessing techniques which makes a radical change in the behaviour of prediction. We compare the performance of the model based on two types of hyper-parameter tuning Bayesian optimisation (BO) and Usual Grid search. Our proposed methodologies outperform all state-of-the-art comparative models. We illustrate the methodologies through eight time series datasets from three categories: cryptocurrency, stock index, and short-term load forecasting. ...

Chain-structured neural architecture search for financial time series forecasting ArXiv ID: 2403.14695 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Neural architecture search (NAS) emerged as a way to automatically optimize neural networks for a specific task and dataset. Despite an abundance of research on NAS for images and natural language applications, similar studies for time series data are lacking. Among NAS search spaces, chain-structured are the simplest and most applicable to small datasets like time series. We compare three popular NAS strategies on chain-structured search spaces: Bayesian optimization (specifically Tree-structured Parzen Estimator), the hyperband method, and reinforcement learning in the context of financial time series forecasting. These strategies were employed to optimize simple well-understood neural architectures like the MLP, 1D CNN, and RNN, with more complex temporal fusion transformers (TFT) and their own optimizers included for comparison. We find Bayesian optimization and the hyperband method performing best among the strategies, and RNN and 1D CNN best among the architectures, but all methods were very close to each other with a high variance due to the difficulty of working with financial datasets. We discuss our approach to overcome the variance and provide implementation recommendations for future users and researchers. ...