Statistical Learning for Individualized Asset Allocation
This addresses personalized financial decision-making for individuals, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing statistical learning methods.
The authors tackled the problem of individualized asset allocation with continuous actions and many characteristics by developing a DROVE framework, which improved population financial well-being in an empirical study using Health and Retirement Study data.
We establish a high-dimensional statistical learning framework for individualized asset allocation. Our proposed methodology addresses continuous-action decision-making with a large number of characteristics. We develop a discretization approach to model the effect of continuous actions and allow the discretization frequency to be large and diverge with the number of observations. The value function of continuous-action is estimated using penalized regression with our proposed generalized penalties that are imposed on linear transformations of the model coefficients. We show that our proposed Discretization and Regression with generalized fOlded concaVe penalty on Effect discontinuity (DROVE) approach enjoys desirable theoretical properties and allows for statistical inference of the optimal value associated with optimal decision-making. Empirically, the proposed framework is exercised with the Health and Retirement Study data in finding individualized optimal asset allocation. The results show that our individualized optimal strategy improves the population financial well-being.