Adamantios Ntakaris

Adamantios Ntakaris, Moncef Gabbouj, Juho Kanniainen

High-frequency trading requires fast data processing without information lags for precise stock price forecasting. This high-paced stock price forecasting is usually based on vectors that need to be treated as sequential and time-independent signals due to the time irregularities that are inherent in high-frequency trading. A well-documented and tested method that considers these time-irregularities is a type of recurrent neural network, named long short-term memory neural network. This type of neural network is formed based on cells that perform sequential and stale calculations via gates and states without knowing whether their order, within the cell, is optimal. In this paper, we propose a revised and real-time adjusted long short-term memory cell that selects the best gate or state as its final output. Our cell is running under a shallow topology, has a minimal look-back period, and is trained online. This revised cell achieves lower forecasting error compared to other recurrent neural networks for online high-frequency trading forecasting tasks such as the limit order book mid-price prediction as it has been tested on two high-liquid US and two less-liquid Nordic stocks.

Adamantios Ntakaris, Gbenga Ibikunle

High-frequency trading (HFT) has transformed modern financial markets, making reliable short-term price forecasting models essential. In this study, we present a novel approach to mid-price forecasting using Level 1 limit order book (LOB) data from NASDAQ, focusing on 100 U.S. stocks from the S&P 500 index during the period from September to November 2022. Expanding on our previous work with Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNN), which leveraged automated feature importance techniques based on mean decrease impurity (MDI) and gradient descent (GD), we introduce the Adaptive Learning Policy Engine (ALPE) - a reinforcement learning (RL)-based agent designed for batch-free, immediate mid-price forecasting. ALPE incorporates adaptive epsilon decay to dynamically balance exploration and exploitation, outperforming a diverse range of highly effective machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models in forecasting performance.

Adamantios Ntakaris, Gbenga Ibikunle

This study presents an autonomous experimental machine learning protocol for high-frequency trading (HFT) stock price forecasting that involves a dual competitive feature importance mechanism and clustering via shallow neural network topology for fast training. By incorporating the k-means algorithm into the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), the proposed method addresses the challenges of manual clustering and the reliance on potentially uninformative features. More specifically, our approach involves a dual competitive mechanism for feature importance, combining the mean-decrease impurity (MDI) method and a gradient descent (GD) based feature importance mechanism. This approach, tested on HFT Level 1 order book data for 20 S&P 500 stocks, enhances the forecasting ability of the RBFNN regressor. Our findings suggest that an autonomous approach to feature selection and clustering is crucial, as each stock requires a different input feature space. Overall, by automating the feature selection and clustering processes, we remove the need for manual topological grid search and provide a more efficient way to predict LOB's mid-price.