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.

Top 100 Economics Blogs

Check out the latest "Top 100 Economics Blogs" here. The blurb for No Hesitations (under "Sub-field Economic Blogs") is pretty funny, issuing a stern warning: 

His blog is primarily focused on statistics and econometrics, and is highly technical. Therefore, it is recommended for those with advanced knowledge of economics and mathematics.

In reality, and as I'm sure you'll agree if you're reading this, it's actually simple and intuitive! I guess it's all relative. Anyway the blurb does get this right: "It is especially recommended for those wanting to learn more about dynamic predictive modeling in economics and finance."

Quite apart from pros and cons of its No Hesitations blurb (surely of much more interest to me than to you...), the list provides an informative and timely snapshot of the vibrant economics blogosphere.

Monetary Policy and Global Spillovers

The Bank of Chile's latest Annual Conference volume, Monetary Policy and Global Spillovers: Mechanisms, Effects, and Policy Measures, is now out, here.  In addition to the research presented in the volume, I love the picture on its front cover. So peaceful.

Fourth Penn Quantitative Policy Workshop

Some years ago I blogged on the first Workshop on Quantitative Tools for Macroeconomic Policy Analysis hosted by the Penn Institute for Economic Research (PIER). We just completed the fourth! It was a great group as usual, with approximately 25 participants from around the globe, mostly economists at country central banks, ECB, etc. Some of the happy campers, along with yours truly, appear in the photo. You can find all sorts of information on the workshop site. Information / registration for the next Workshop (May 2019) will presumably be posted in fall. Please consider joining us, and tell your friends!

Pockets of Predictability

Some months ago I blogged on "Pockets of Predictability," here. The Farmer-Schmidt-Timmermann paper that I mentioned is now available, here.

Ghysels and Marcellino on Time-Series Forecasting

If you're teaching a forecasting course and want a good text, or if you're just looking for an informative and modern treatment, see Applied Economic Forecasting Using Time Series Methods, by Eric Ghysels and Massimilliano Marcellino. It will be published this week by Oxford University Press. It has a very nice modern awareness of Big Data with emphasis on reduced-rank structure, regularization methods -- LASSO appears as early as p. 23! -- , structural change, mixed-frequencies, etc. It's also very tastefully done in terms of what's included and what's excluded, emphasizing what's most important and de-emphasizing the rest. As regards non-linearity, for example, volatility dynamics and regime-switching are in, and most of the rest is out.

The History of Forecasting Competitions

Check out Rob Hyndman's "Brief History of Time Series Forecasting Competitions". I'm not certain whether the title's parallel to Hawking's Brief History of Time is intentional. At any rate, even if Hyndman's focus is rather more narrow than the origin and fate of the universe, his post is still fascinating and informative. Thanks to Ross Askanasi for bring it to my attention.

An Art Market Return Index

Rare and collectible goods, from fine art to fine wine, have many interesting and special aspects. Some are shared and some are idiosyncratic.

From the vantage point of alternative investments (among other things), it would be useful to have high-frequency indices for those asset markets, just as we do for traditional "financial" asset markets like equities.

Along those lines, in "Monthly Art Market Returns" Bocart, Ghysels, and Hafner develop a high-frequency measurement approach, despite the fact that art sales generally occur very infrequently. Effectively they develop a mixed-frequency repeat-sales model, which captures the correlation between art prices and other liquid asset prices that are observed much more frequently. They use the model to extract a monthly art market return index, as well as sub-indices for contemporary art, impressionist art, etc.

Quite fascinating and refreshingly novel.

Econometrics, Machine Learning, and Big Data

Here's a useful slide deck by Greg Duncan at Amazon, from a recent seminar at FRB San Francisco (powerpoint, ughhh, sorry...). It's basically a superset of the keynote talk he gave at Penn's summer 2017 conference, Big Data in Predictive Dynamic Econometric Modeling. Greg understands better than most the close connection between "machine learning" and econometrics / statistics, especially between machine learning and the predictive perspective emphasized in time series for a century or so.

Classic Jacod (1994) Paper

J. Financial Econometrics will soon publish Jean Jacod's brilliant and beautiful 1994 paper, "Limit of Random Measures Associated with the Increments of a Brownian Semimartingale", which I just had the pleasure of reading for the first time. (Ungated version here.) Along with several others, I was asked to supply some comments for the issue's introduction. What follows is adapted from those comments, providing some historical background. (Except that it's not really historical background -- keep reading...)

Jacod's paper effectively lays the foundation for the vast subsequent econometric "realized volatility" (empirical quadratic variation) literature of the past twenty years.  Reading it leads me to recall my early realized volatility work with Torben Andersen and Tim Bollerslev in the late 1990's and early 2000's. It started in the mid-1990's at a meeting of the NBER Asset Pricing Program, where I was the discussant for a paper of theirs, eventually published as Andersen and Bollerslev (1998). They were using realized volatility as the "realization" in a study of GARCH volatility forecast accuracy, and my discussion was along the lines of, "That's interesting, but I think you've struck gold without realizing it -- why not skip the GARCH and instead simply characterize, model, and forecast realized volatility directly?".

So we decided to explore realized volatility directly. Things really took off with Andersen et al. (2001) and Andersen et al. (2003). The research program was primarily empirical, but of course we also wanted to advance the theoretical foundations. We knew some relevant stochastic integration theory, and we made progress culminating in Theorem 2 of Andersen et al. (2003). Around the same time, Ole Bardorff-Nielsen and Neil Shephard were also producing penetrating and closely-related results (most notably Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard, 2002). Very exciting early times.

Now let's return to Jacod's 1994 paper, and consider it against the above historical background of early econometric realized volatility papers. Doing so reveals not only its elegance and generality, but also its prescience: It was written well before the "historical background"!! One wonders how it went unknown and unpublished for so long.

References

Andersen, T. G. and T. Bollerslev (1998), "Answering the Skeptics: Yes, Standard Volatility Models do Provide Accurate Forecasts," International Economic Review, 39, 885-905.

Andersen, T.G., T. Bollerslev, F.X. Diebold, and P. Labys (2001), "The Distribution of Realized Exchange Rate Volatility," Journal of the American Statistical Association, 96, 42-55.

Andersen, T.G., T. Bollerslev, F.X. Diebold, and P. Labys (2003), "Modeling and Forecasting Realized Volatility," Econometrica, 71, 579-625.

Barndorff-Nielsen, O. and N. Shephard (2002), "Econometric Analysis of Realized Volatility and its Use in Estimating Stochastic Volatility Models," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 64,
253-280.

Jacod, J. (1994), "Limit of Random Measures Associated with the Increments of a Brownian Semimartingale," Manuscript, Institute de Mathematiques de Jussieu, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.