Pretests for genetic-programming evolved trading programs: “zero-intelligence” strategies and lottery trading - Part 2

Automated Trader Magazine

Part 2 of Pretests for genetic-programming evolved trading programs: “zero-intelligence” strategies and lottery trading bootstrap paper. By Shu-Heng Chen and Nicolas Navet

To download this article in PDF format, please click here


3 What does the pretest tell us?

The outcomes of the pretests provide us with answers to the following two ques­tions: is there something essential to learn on the training data that can be of interest for the out-of-sample period ? Does the GP implementation show some evidence of effectiveness in that task ? Clearly, before actually trading with GP evolved programs, these two questions must be answered with reasonable cer­tainty; the rest of this section explains how pretests may help in that regard.


3.1 Question 1: is there something to learn?

The null hypothesis fl4,0 corresponding to pretest 4 has been presented in Sec­tion 2.2. We introduce pretest 5 that will be used in conjunction with pretest 4.

Pretest 5: equivalent intensity random search with training and validation versus lottery trading.


Here, we compare lottery trading to a random search with training and validation, and a search intensity equivalent to the one used for GP in pretest 4. The null hypothesis fl5,0 is that the equivalent in­tensity random does not outperform lottery trading on the out-of-sample data. Depending on the validity of fl4,0 and fl5,0, we can draw the conclusions that are summarized in Table 1. ...