Reinforcement Learning

Advancing Algorithmic Trading: A Multi-Technique Enhancement of Deep Q-Network Models ArXiv ID: 2311.05743 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This study enhances a Deep Q-Network (DQN) trading model by incorporating advanced techniques like Prioritized Experience Replay, Regularized Q-Learning, Noisy Networks, Dueling, and Double DQN. Extensive tests on assets like BTC/USD and AAPL demonstrate superior performance compared to the original model, with marked increases in returns and Sharpe Ratio, indicating improved risk-adjusted rewards. Notably, convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, both 1D and 2D, significantly boost returns, suggesting their effectiveness in market trend analysis. Across instruments, these enhancements have yielded stable and high gains, eclipsing the baseline and highlighting the potential of CNNs in trading systems. The study suggests that applying sophisticated deep learning within reinforcement learning can greatly enhance automated trading, urging further exploration into advanced methods for broader financial applicability. The findings advocate for the continued evolution of AI in finance. ...

Causal Inference on Investment Constraints and Non-stationarity in Dynamic Portfolio Optimization through Reinforcement Learning ArXiv ID: 2311.04946 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In this study, we have developed a dynamic asset allocation investment strategy using reinforcement learning techniques. To begin with, we have addressed the crucial issue of incorporating non-stationarity of financial time series data into reinforcement learning algorithms, which is a significant implementation in the application of reinforcement learning in investment strategies. Our findings highlight the significance of introducing certain variables such as regime change in the environment setting to enhance the prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the application of reinforcement learning in investment strategies provides a remarkable advantage of setting the optimization problem flexibly. This enables the integration of practical constraints faced by investors into the algorithm, resulting in efficient optimization. Our study has categorized the investment strategy formulation conditions into three main categories, including performance measurement indicators, portfolio management rules, and other constraints. We have evaluated the impact of incorporating these conditions into the environment and rewards in a reinforcement learning framework and examined how they influence investment behavior. ...

Combining Deep Learning on Order Books with Reinforcement Learning for Profitable Trading ArXiv ID: 2311.02088 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract High-frequency trading is prevalent, where automated decisions must be made quickly to take advantage of price imbalances and patterns in price action that forecast near-future movements. While many algorithms have been explored and tested, analytical methods fail to harness the whole nature of the market environment by focusing on a limited domain. With the evergrowing machine learning field, many large-scale end-to-end studies on raw data have been successfully employed to increase the domain scope for profitable trading but are very difficult to replicate. Combining deep learning on the order books with reinforcement learning is one way of breaking down large-scale end-to-end learning into more manageable and lightweight components for reproducibility, suitable for retail trading. The following work focuses on forecasting returns across multiple horizons using order flow imbalance and training three temporal-difference learning models for five financial instruments to provide trading signals. The instruments used are two foreign exchange pairs (GBPUSD and EURUSD), two indices (DE40 and FTSE100), and one commodity (XAUUSD). The performances of these 15 agents are evaluated through backtesting simulation, and successful models proceed through to forward testing on a retail trading platform. The results prove potential but require further minimal modifications for consistently profitable trading to fully handle retail trading costs, slippage, and spread fluctuation. ...

Applying Reinforcement Learning to Option Pricing and Hedging ArXiv ID: 2310.04336 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This thesis provides an overview of the recent advances in reinforcement learning in pricing and hedging financial instruments, with a primary focus on a detailed explanation of the Q-Learning Black Scholes approach, introduced by Halperin (2017). This reinforcement learning approach bridges the traditional Black and Scholes (1973) model with novel artificial intelligence algorithms, enabling option pricing and hedging in a completely model-free and data-driven way. This paper also explores the algorithm’s performance under different state variables and scenarios for a European put option. The results reveal that the model is an accurate estimator under different levels of volatility and hedging frequency. Moreover, this method exhibits robust performance across various levels of option’s moneyness. Lastly, the algorithm incorporates proportional transaction costs, indicating diverse impacts on profit and loss, affected by different statistical properties of the state variables. ...

Navigating Uncertainty in ESG Investing ArXiv ID: 2310.02163 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract The widespread confusion among investors regarding Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) rankings assigned by rating agencies has underscored a critical issue in sustainable investing. To address this uncertainty, our research has devised methods that not only recognize this ambiguity but also offer tailored investment strategies for different investor profiles. By developing ESG ensemble strategies and integrating ESG scores into a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, we aim to optimize portfolios that cater to both financial returns and ESG-focused outcomes. Additionally, by proposing the Double-Mean-Variance model, we classify three types of investors based on their risk preferences. We also introduce ESG-adjusted Capital Asset Pricing Models (CAPMs) to assess the performance of these optimized portfolios. Ultimately, our comprehensive approach provides investors with tools to navigate the inherent ambiguities of ESG ratings, facilitating more informed investment decisions. ...

CAD: Clustering And Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Multi-Period Portfolio Management Strategy ArXiv ID: 2310.01319 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In this paper, we present a novel trading strategy that integrates reinforcement learning methods with clustering techniques for portfolio management in multi-period trading. Specifically, we leverage the clustering method to categorize stocks into various clusters based on their financial indices. Subsequently, we utilize the algorithm Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic to determine the trading actions for stocks within each cluster. Finally, we employ the algorithm DDPG to generate the portfolio weight vector, which decides the amount of stocks to buy, sell, or hold according to the trading actions of different clusters. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to combine clustering methods and reinforcement learning methods for portfolio management in the context of multi-period trading. Our proposed strategy is evaluated using a series of back-tests on four datasets, comprising a of 800 stocks, obtained from the Shanghai Stock Exchange and National Association of Securities Deal Automated Quotations sources. Our results demonstrate that our approach outperforms conventional portfolio management techniques, such as the Robust Median Reversion strategy, Passive Aggressive Median Reversion Strategy, and several machine learning methods, across various metrics. In our back-test experiments, our proposed strategy yields an average return of 151% over 360 trading periods with 800 stocks, compared to the highest return of 124% achieved by other techniques over identical trading periods and stocks. ...

INTAGS: Interactive Agent-Guided Simulation ArXiv ID: 2309.01784 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract In many applications involving multi-agent system (MAS), it is imperative to test an experimental (Exp) autonomous agent in a high-fidelity simulator prior to its deployment to production, to avoid unexpected losses in the real-world. Such a simulator acts as the environmental background (BG) agent(s), called agent-based simulator (ABS), aiming to replicate the complex real MAS. However, developing realistic ABS remains challenging, mainly due to the sequential and dynamic nature of such systems. To fill this gap, we propose a metric to distinguish between real and synthetic multi-agent systems, which is evaluated through the live interaction between the Exp and BG agents to explicitly account for the systems’ sequential nature. Specifically, we characterize the system/environment by studying the effect of a sequence of BG agents’ responses to the environment state evolution and take such effects’ differences as MAS distance metric; The effect estimation is cast as a causal inference problem since the environment evolution is confounded with the previous environment state. Importantly, we propose the Interactive Agent-Guided Simulation (INTAGS) framework to build a realistic ABS by optimizing over this novel metric. To adapt to any environment with interactive sequential decision making agents, INTAGS formulates the simulator as a stochastic policy in reinforcement learning. Moreover, INTAGS utilizes the policy gradient update to bypass differentiating the proposed metric such that it can support non-differentiable operations of multi-agent environments. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of INTAGS on an equity stock market simulation example. We show that using INTAGS to calibrate the simulator can generate more realistic market data compared to the state-of-the-art conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network approach. ...

JAX-LOB: A GPU-Accelerated limit order book simulator to unlock large scale reinforcement learning for trading ArXiv ID: 2308.13289 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Financial exchanges across the world use limit order books (LOBs) to process orders and match trades. For research purposes it is important to have large scale efficient simulators of LOB dynamics. LOB simulators have previously been implemented in the context of agent-based models (ABMs), reinforcement learning (RL) environments, and generative models, processing order flows from historical data sets and hand-crafted agents alike. For many applications, there is a requirement for processing multiple books, either for the calibration of ABMs or for the training of RL agents. We showcase the first GPU-enabled LOB simulator designed to process thousands of books in parallel, with a notably reduced per-message processing time. The implementation of our simulator - JAX-LOB - is based on design choices that aim to best exploit the powers of JAX without compromising on the realism of LOB-related mechanisms. We integrate JAX-LOB with other JAX packages, to provide an example of how one may address an optimal execution problem with reinforcement learning, and to share some preliminary results from end-to-end RL training on GPUs. ...

Insurance pricing on price comparison websites via reinforcement learning ArXiv ID: 2308.06935 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract The emergence of price comparison websites (PCWs) has presented insurers with unique challenges in formulating effective pricing strategies. Operating on PCWs requires insurers to strike a delicate balance between competitive premiums and profitability, amidst obstacles such as low historical conversion rates, limited visibility of competitors’ actions, and a dynamic market environment. In addition to this, the capital intensive nature of the business means pricing below the risk levels of customers can result in solvency issues for the insurer. To address these challenges, this paper introduces reinforcement learning (RL) framework that learns the optimal pricing policy by integrating model-based and model-free methods. The model-based component is used to train agents in an offline setting, avoiding cold-start issues, while model-free algorithms are then employed in a contextual bandit (CB) manner to dynamically update the pricing policy to maximise the expected revenue. This facilitates quick adaptation to evolving market dynamics and enhances algorithm efficiency and decision interpretability. The paper also highlights the importance of evaluating pricing policies using an offline dataset in a consistent fashion and demonstrates the superiority of the proposed methodology over existing off-the-shelf RL/CB approaches. We validate our methodology using synthetic data, generated to reflect private commercially available data within real-world insurers, and compare against 6 other benchmark approaches. Our hybrid agent outperforms these benchmarks in terms of sample efficiency and cumulative reward with the exception of an agent that has access to perfect market information which would not be available in a real-world set-up. ...

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Goal-Based Wealth Management ArXiv ID: 2307.13501 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Goal-based investing is an approach to wealth management that prioritizes achieving specific financial goals. It is naturally formulated as a sequential decision-making problem as it requires choosing the appropriate investment until a goal is achieved. Consequently, reinforcement learning, a machine learning technique appropriate for sequential decision-making, offers a promising path for optimizing these investment strategies. In this paper, a novel approach for robust goal-based wealth management based on deep reinforcement learning is proposed. The experimental results indicate its superiority over several goal-based wealth management benchmarks on both simulated and historical market data. ...