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A black swan; credit: Wikimedia
The replicability crisis in science
Recent public reports have underscored a crisis of replicability in numerous fields of science:
In 2012, Amgen researchers reported that they were able to replicate fewer than 10 of 53 cancer studies. In March 2014, physicists announced with fanfare that they had detected evidence of gravitational waves from the “inflation” epoch of the big bang. However, other researchers were unable to verify this conclusion. The current consensus is that the twisting patterns in the data are due to dust in the Milky Way, not inflation. In 2015, in a
Continue reading The failure of anomaly indicators in finance
Venice astrological circle; credit Wikimedia
Pseudoscience and forecasting
Suppose, during a nightly TV weather broadcast, that a reporter presented forecasts by persons, with no credentials in mathematical meteorology, who based their analysis on eyeballing a few charts and graphs. If anyone took such amateur forecasts seriously, when a severe storm was approaching, rather than relying on the consensus of qualified scientists assisted by state-of-the-art supercomputer models, they would risk disaster.
Or suppose that someone suggested that “biorhythms” (a person’s presumed daily, monthly and yearly cycles that supposedly start in sync at birth) could be used to predict the performance
Continue reading Another miserable year for market forecasters
Marcos López de Prado
Introduction
Marcos López de Prado, whom we have featured in previous Math Scholar articles (see Article A, Article B and Article C), has been invited to present a keynote presentation at the ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Finance, to be conducted virtually October 14-16, 2020.
López de Prado is a faculty member of Cornell University and also CEO of True Positive Technologies, LP, a private firm that provides machine learning techniques techniques for finance applications. He is also the author of two books in the field: Advances in Financial Machine Learning, published by Wiley
Continue reading López de Prado on machine learning in finance
Amateur pseudoscience
Suppose, during a TV weather broadcast, that the reporter presented “forecasts” from several private persons, wholly unqualified in meteorology, who base their forecasts on eyeballing a handful of charts and graphs. Most of us would never rely on such clearly amateurish methods ourselves, and would reject outright any such forecasts presented by others. If anyone took such forecasts seriously, when a severe storm was approaching, rather than relying on the consensus of qualified government scientists assisted by state-of-the-art supercomputer models, they would risk disaster, including the potential loss of life.
Similarly, suppose that after an examination at
Continue reading Day-trading in the age of coronavirus
The scales of justice (courtesy Wikimedia)
Covid-19’s grim toll
The statistics are staggering: As of 1 June 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins University database, the U.S. had logged over 1.811 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 and over 105,000 deaths. The U.K. was next, with over 277,000 confirmed cases and over 38,000 deaths. Worldwide, over 6.3 million cases had been confirmed, with more than 376,000 deaths. If current trends continue, the U.S. death toll alone will soon exceed that of all wars in its history except for the Civil War and World War II.
The economic costs have been
Continue reading Covid-19 and the worth of a human life
Marcos Lopez de Prado, the financial mathematician whom we have mentioned several times before in this venue (see, for example, Marcos Lopez de Prado testifies before U.S. Congress), has co-written an article entitled Exit Strategies for COVID-19: An Application of the K-SEIR Model. The article, actually a 52-page presentation file, is co-authored by Lopez de Prado (Cornell University) and Alexander Lipton (Hebrew University of Jerusalem and MIT).
In this presentation, the authors argue that universal lockdowns are blunt tools that should be employed only for brief periods of time. They then present a new mathematical model (K-SIER), which permits one
Continue reading Exit strategies for Covid-19
Recent progress in artificial intelligence
It is no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) systems have made enormous strides in recent years, partly due to the adoption of Bayesian (probability-based) machine learning techniques rather than the rule-based techniques used until about 20 years ago. One highly publicized AI advance was the 2011 defeat of two champion contestants on the American quiz show “Jeopardy!” by an IBM-developed computer system named “Watson.” The Watson achievement was particularly impressive because it involved natural language understanding, i.e. the understanding of ordinary (and often tricky) English text. Legendary Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings conceded by writing on
Continue reading Is AI coming after your job?
Marcos Lopez de Prado
Famed quantitative financial mathematician Marcos Lopez de Prado, who was recently featured as Master of the Robots by Bloomberg, testified today (6 December 2019) before the U.S. Congress, together with four other panelists.
The topic for the panel, organized by the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, was Robots on Wall Street: The Impact of AI on Capital Markets and Jobs in the Financial Services Industry. The five panelists who testified are:
Charlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Marcos Lopez de Prado, Professor of
Continue reading Marcos Lopez de Prado testifies before U.S. Congress
Gregory Zuckerman, author of The Greatest Trade Ever, has published a new book highlighting the life and work of Jim Simons, who, at the age of 40, walked away from a very successful career as a research mathematician and cryptologist to try his hand at the financial markets, and ultimately revolutionized the field. Zuckerman’s new book is titled The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution.
Upbringing and academic career
Simons’ background hardly suggested that he would one day lead one of the most successful, if not the most successful, quantitative hedge fund operation in
Continue reading Jim Simons: The man who solved the market
Credit: IPCC
The facts of climate change
At this point in time, the basic facts of climate change are not disputable in the least. Careful planet-wide observations by NASA and others have confirmed that 2018 was the fourth-warmest year in recorded history. The only warmer years were 2016, 2017 and 2015, respectively, and 18 of the 19 warmest years in history have occurred since 2001. Countless observational studies and supercomputer simulations have confirmed both the fact of warming and the conclusion that this warming is principally due to human activity. These studies and computations have been scrutinized in great
Continue reading Feast or famine? The financial risks of climate change
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