Category: Data

Gauging how useful alternative data is

Hands up, if you’ve heard the words “alternative data” being used in quant circles recently? I can see a lot of hands up! I could ask the same questions for machine learning and artificial intelligence, and probably get the same reaction. The crux of any good trading strategy is using data as an input and…

How much to pay for alternative data?

How much is something worth? The simplest definition is the price someone is willing to pay for it. Is a Leonardo da Vinci painting worth four hundred and fifty million dollars? Someone was willing to pay that much for it (and another party was willing to sell it them for that amount). Such a market…

Time series workshop at NIPS

I was recently at NIPS, a week long conference on machine learning. With over 8000 attendees, a new record for the event, it is one of the biggest conferences dedicated to machine learning. In the coming weeks, I’m looking forward to writing about the various subjects discussed at the event, including my general takeaways. In…

Machine learning the mundane

Try to think of the “buzziest”, buzzwords you can think of. Support vector machines? No. Random Forests? No. However, group these together (and much more) under the umbrella of “machine learning”, and suddenly we have created a buzzword! The basic idea of many of the techniques which underpin machine learning is find relationships between variables. In particular,…