Machines Learning Finance

FRB Atlanta recently hosted a meeting on "Machines Learning Finance". Kind of an ominous, threatening (Orwellian?) title, but there were lots of (non-threatening...) pieces. I found the surveys by Ryan Adams and John Cunningham particularly entertaining. A clear theme on display throughout the meeting was that "supervised learning" -- the main strand of machine learning -- is just function estimation, and in particular, conditional mean estimation. That is, regression. It may involve high dimensions, non-linearities, binary variables, etc., but at the end of the day it's still just regression. If you're a regular No Hesitations reader, the "insight" that supervised learning = regression will hardly be novel to you, but still it's good to see it disseminating widely.