1.8LGMay 11
A Comparative Study of Model Selection Criteria for Symbolic RegressionAli Soltani, Gabriel Kronberger, Fabricio Olivetti de Franca et al.
Effective model selection is critical in symbolic regression (SR) to identify mathematical expressions that balance accuracy and complexity, and have low expected error on unseen data. Many modern implementations of genetic programming (GP) for SR generate a set of Pareto optimal candidate solutions, but reliable automatic selection of solutions that generalize well remains an open issue. Current literature offers various information-theoretic and Bayesian approaches, yet comprehensive comparisons of their performance across different data regimes are limited. This study presents a systematic empirical comparison of widely used selection criteria: the Akaike information criterion (AIC), the corrected AIC (AICc), the Bayesian information criterion (BIC), minimum description length (MDL), as well as Efron's bootstrap estimate for the in-sample prediction error on seven synthetic datasets with Gaussian noise. We rank candidate expressions generated by perturbing ground-truth functions to assess generalization error and selection probability of the ground-truth expression. Our findings reveal that MDL consistently identifies models with the lowest test error and the shortest length across most datasets. While no single criterion dominates all results, MDL and BIC produced the highest probability of selecting the ground-truth expressions.
CEFeb 17, 2025
Market-Derived Financial Sentiment Analysis: Context-Aware Language Models for Crypto ForecastingHamid Moradi-Kamali, Mohammad-Hossein Rajabi-Ghozlou, Mahdi Ghazavi et al.
Financial Sentiment Analysis (FSA) traditionally relies on human-annotated sentiment labels to infer investor sentiment and forecast market movements. However, inferring the potential market impact of words based on their human-perceived intentions is inherently challenging. We hypothesize that the historical market reactions to words, offer a more reliable indicator of their potential impact on markets than subjective sentiment interpretations by human annotators. To test this hypothesis, a market-derived labeling approach is proposed to assign tweet labels based on ensuing short-term price trends, enabling the language model to capture the relationship between textual signals and market dynamics directly. A domain-specific language model was fine-tuned on these labels, achieving up to an 11% improvement in short-term trend prediction accuracy over traditional sentiment-based benchmarks. Moreover, by incorporating market and temporal context through prompt-tuning, the proposed context-aware language model demonstrated an accuracy of 89.6% on a curated dataset of 227 impactful Bitcoin-related news events with significant market impacts. Aggregating daily tweet predictions into trading signals, our method outperformed traditional fusion models (which combine sentiment-based and price-based predictions). It challenged the assumption that sentiment-based signals are inferior to price-based predictions in forecasting market movements. Backtesting these signals across three distinct market regimes yielded robust Sharpe ratios of up to 5.07 in trending markets and 3.73 in neutral markets. Our findings demonstrate that language models can serve as effective short-term market predictors. This paradigm shift underscores the untapped capabilities of language models in financial decision-making and opens new avenues for market prediction applications.