We consider the problem of fast time-series data clustering. Building on previous work modeling the correlation-based Hamiltonian of spin variables we present a fast non-expensive agglomerative algorithm. The method is tested on synthetic correlated time-series and noisy synthetic data-sets with built-in cluster structure to demonstrate that the algorithm produces meaningful non-trivial results. We argue that ASPC can reduce compute time costs and resource usage cost for large scale clustering while being serialized and hence has no obvious parallelization requirement. The algorithm can be an effective choice for state-detection for online learning in a fast non-linear data environment because the algorithm requires no prior information about the number of clusters.

Recent years have witnessed the successful marriage of finance innovations and AI techniques in various finance applications including quantitative trading (QT). Despite great research efforts devoted to leveraging deep learning (DL) methods for building better QT strategies, existing studies still face serious challenges especially from the side of finance, such as the balance of risk and return, the resistance to extreme loss, and the interpretability of strategies, which limit the application of DL-based strategies in real-life financial markets. In this work, we propose AlphaStock, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) based investment strategy enhanced by interpretable deep attention networks, to address the above challenges. Our main contributions are summarized as follows: i) We integrate deep attention networks with a Sharpe ratio-oriented reinforcement learning framework to achieve a risk-return balanced investment strategy; ii) We suggest modeling interrelationships among assets to avoid selection bias and develop a cross-asset attention mechanism; iii) To our best knowledge, this work is among the first to offer an interpretable investment strategy using deep reinforcement learning models. The experiments on long-periodic U.S. and Chinese markets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of AlphaStock over diverse market states. It turns out that AlphaStock tends to select the stocks as winners with high long-term growth, low volatility, high intrinsic value, and being undervalued recently.

Anti-money laundering (AML) regulations play a critical role in safeguarding financial systems, but bear high costs for institutions and drive financial exclusion for those on the socioeconomic and international margins. The advent of cryptocurrency has introduced an intriguing paradox: pseudonymity allows criminals to hide in plain sight, but open data gives more power to investigators and enables the crowdsourcing of forensic analysis. Meanwhile advances in learning algorithms show great promise for the AML toolkit. In this workshop tutorial, we motivate the opportunity to reconcile the cause of safety with that of financial inclusion. We contribute the Elliptic Data Set, a time series graph of over 200K Bitcoin transactions (nodes), 234K directed payment flows (edges), and 166 node features, including ones based on non-public data; to our knowledge, this is the largest labelled transaction data set publicly available in any cryptocurrency. We share results from a binary classification task predicting illicit transactions using variations of Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), with GCN being of special interest as an emergent new method for capturing relational information. The results show the superiority of Random Forest (RF), but also invite algorithmic work to combine the respective powers of RF and graph methods. Lastly, we consider visualization for analysis and explainability, which is difficult given the size and dynamism of real-world transaction graphs, and we offer a simple prototype capable of navigating the graph and observing model performance on illicit activity over time. With this tutorial and data set, we hope to a) invite feedback in support of our ongoing inquiry, and b) inspire others to work on this societally important challenge.

We examine a dynamic game of competitive persuasion played between two long-lived sellers over $T \leq \infty$ periods. Each period, each seller provides information via a Blackwell experiment to a single short-lived buyer, who buys from the seller whose product has the highest expected quality. We solve for the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of this game, and conduct comparative statics: in particular we find that long horizons lead to less information.

We present a solution for the problems related to the application of multivariate Garch models to markets with a large number of stocks by restricting the form of the covariance matrix. It contains one component describing the market and a second simple component to account for the remaining contribution to the volatility. This allows the analytical calculation of the inverse covariance matrix. We compare our model with the results of other Garch models for the daily returns from the S&P500 market. The description of the covariance matrix turns out to be similar to the DCC model but has fewer free parameters and requires less computing time. The model also has the advantage that it contains the calculation of dynamic beta values. As applications we use the daily values of $\beta$ coefficients available from the market component to confirm a transition of the market in 2006. Further we discuss the relationship of our model with the leverage effect.

We build a heuristic that takes a given option price in the tails with strike K and extends (for calls, all strikes > K, for put all strikes < K) assuming the continuation falls into what we define as "Karamata Constant" over which the strong Pareto law holds. The heuristic produces relative prices for options, with for sole parameter the tail index alpha under some mild arbitrage constraints.

Usual restrictions such as finiteness of variance are not required.

The heuristic allows us to scrutinize the volatility surface and test theories of relative tail option mispricing and overpricing usually built on thin tailed models and modification of the Black-Scholes formula.

Nonlinear dynamic volatility has been observed in many financial time series. The recently proposed quantile periodogram offers an alternative way to examine this phenomena in the frequency domain. The quantile periodogram is constructed from trigonometric quantile regression of time series data at different frequencies and quantile levels. It is a useful tool for quantile-frequency analysis (QFA) of nonlinear serial dependence. This paper introduces a number of spectral divergence metrics based on the quantile periodogram for diagnostic checks of financial time series models and model-based discriminant analysis. The parametric bootstrapping technique is employed to compute the $p$-values of the metrics. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated empirically by a case study using the daily log returns of the S\&P 500 index over three periods of time together with their GARCH-type models. The results show that the QFA method is able to provide additional insights into the goodness of fit of these financial time series models that may have been missed by conventional tests. The results also show that the QFA method offers a more informative way of discriminant analysis for detecting regime changes in time series.

This research aims to explore business processes and what the factors have major influence on electronic marketing and CRM systems? Which data needs to be analyzed and integrated in the system, and how to do that? How effective of integration the electronic marketing and CRM with big data enabled to support Marketing and Customer Relation operations. Research based on case studies at XYZ Organization: International Language Education Service in Surabaya. Research is studying secondary data which is supported by qualitative research methods. Using purposive sampling technique with observation and interviewing several respondents who need the system integration. The documentation of interview is coded to keep confidentiality of the informant. Method of extending participation, triangulation of data sources, discussions and the adequacy of the theory are uses to validate data. Miles and Huberman models is uses to do analysis the data interview. Results of the research are expected to become a holistic approach to fully integrate the Big Data Analytics program with electronic marketing and CRM systems.

Nowadays many financial derivatives which are traded on stock and futures exchanges, such as American or Bermudan options, are of early exercise type. Often the pricing of early exercise options gives rise to high-dimensional optimal stopping problems, since the dimension corresponds to the number of underlyings in the associated hedging portfolio. High-dimensional optimal stopping problems are, however, notoriously difficult to solve due to the well-known curse of dimensionality. In this work we propose an algorithm for solving such problems, which is based on deep learning and computes, in the context of early exercise option pricing, both approximations for an optimal exercise strategy and the price of the considered option. The proposed algorithm can also be applied to optimal stopping problems that arise in other areas where the underlying stochastic process can be efficiently simulated. We present numerical results for a large number of example problems, which include the pricing of many high-dimensional American and Bermudan options such as, for example, Bermudan max-call options in up to 5000 dimensions. Most of the obtained results are compared to reference values computed by exploiting the specific problem design or, where available, to reference values from the literature. These numerical results suggest that the proposed algorithm is highly effective in the case of many underlyings, in terms of both accuracy and speed.