Artificial Intelligence for Financial Modeling

Catalog description

This is a hands-on course on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) where the emphasis is not only on understanding the theoretical underpinnings of various AI models but also on building, evaluating, and critiquing A.I. models as they apply to the finance industry. This course begins with an introduction of Machine Learning models; various key ideas such as bias-variance tradeoff, cross-validation, regularization techniques are introduced with relevant examples from Finance. The course then proceeds to discuss Artificial Neural Networks and its relevance to Deep Learning. Foundational ideas such as back-propagation are discussed in sufficient detail; we also lay a lot of emphasis on evaluating the performance of all these models. A key objective of this course is help students build cutting-edge A.I. models that are ready for prime time, i.e., real-life applications. Fittingly, we work with several real-life datasets and case studies from banking and finance. We will work with three case studies, each of which span multiple sessions. -In the first case study, students use Machine Learning algorithms to understand how imbalanced datasets are handled in real-life. -In the second study, students use time series data and learn not only about the power of regularization techniques but also to highlight the prominence of A.I. in financial markets. -In the third case study, students learn how to use cutting-edge Deep Learning models to extract sentiments from disparate news sources; these are in turn used to generate trading strategies. By contrasting the effort that goes into and the payoff obtained from Machine Learning and Deep Learning models, students gain an intuitive appreciation of both these classes of models. Offered as BTEC 494 , FNCE 494 and FTEC 494 .