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Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

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Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#21

Post by dsacco »

lordnacho wrote: post #16

Hedge fund guy here. - You need to know something about the domain in order to make sensible predictions. Is the data daily? Is it per second? Is it ticks? You can't build a sensible model if you don't know that, even if you have good predictions. Relative cost will vary a lot between timescales. - It matters what the features are. Maybe there's some clever reason why it doesn't, but until I hear why I'm going to tak…

I don't know how it's going for Numerai, but I'd be interested in picking your brain a bit. If you don't want to put contact info in your profile, do you mind shooting me an email?

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#22

Post by nradov »

gravypod wrote: post #11

Couldn't I make thousands of fake accounts and submit thousands of slightly different models. Then after a while I could push one or two of my stocks higher in my models artificially. If you represented a large enough % of the "data scientists" in this hedge fund you could make it look like your stock is "definitely" work investment. After they invest in your company, you could take off to the hills. Hell, you don't…

You don't even need to push one or two stocks higher. With thousands of fake accounts you could just pick a different stock for each account at random. Certainly a few of those stocks will turn in huge returns. Collect your Bitcoin reward from Numerai. Repeat.

Maybe they have some way of preventing people from gaming the system that way?

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#23

Post by ikeboy »

dsacco wrote: post #9
kowdermeister wrote: post #5

"In December 2015, we created the world’s first encrypted data science tournament for stock market predictions. Since then, Numerai data scientists have submitted 13,350,675,598 equity price predictions. The most accurate and original machine learning models from the world’s best data scientists are synthesized into a collective artificial intelligence that controls the capital in Numerai’s hedge fund." What does thi…

Leaving out the marketing hyperbole, it means that Numerai's core software is an automated trading system derived from, and ostensibly trained on, the most accurate pricing models and insights put forward by participants (the data scientists). Participants with the most accurate [1] insights are paid a sum in exchange for the insights being incorporated into the hedge fund's trading system, which in turn manages the…

The "predictions" are submitted only knowing a portion of the dataset, but the winners are chosen based on the entire dataset, which is supposed to prevent overfitting.

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#24

Post by gravypod »

nradov wrote: post #22
gravypod wrote: post #11

Couldn't I make thousands of fake accounts and submit thousands of slightly different models. Then after a while I could push one or two of my stocks higher in my models artificially. If you represented a large enough % of the "data scientists" in this hedge fund you could make it look like your stock is "definitely" work investment. After they invest in your company, you could take off to the hills. Hell, you don't…

You don't even need to push one or two stocks higher. With thousands of fake accounts you could just pick a different stock for each account at random. Certainly a few of those stocks will turn in huge returns. Collect your Bitcoin reward from Numerai. Repeat. Maybe they have some way of preventing people from gaming the system that way?

I didn't think of that, great idea!

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#25

Post by mortehu »

bigdubs wrote: post #6
kowdermeister wrote: post #5

"In December 2015, we created the world’s first encrypted data science tournament for stock market predictions. Since then, Numerai data scientists have submitted 13,350,675,598 equity price predictions. The most accurate and original machine learning models from the world’s best data scientists are synthesized into a collective artificial intelligence that controls the capital in Numerai’s hedge fund." What does thi…

Monkeys throwing darts at the board. This brings to mind the Buffett hedge fund wager, where he invested in a vanguard s&p 500 tracking fund (VFIAX) and a hedge fund actively managed an equal amount, and Mr. Buffett ended up winning handily.

> Mr. Buffett ended up winning handily.

The bet isn't over until December 31, 2017: http://longbets.org/362/

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#26

Post by delegate »

"It's just a pure math problem. It's like a math competition. You don't need to know anything about finance, you don't know anything about hedge funds... you don't even have to speak English..."

This is not a pure math problem. Eventually the outcome of all these models and predictions affects the stock prices and - if it becomes as successful as you hope - the economy as a whole. And the physical world: people, animals, plants, pollution, CO2 and so on.

I would much rather see work in that area - than this data juggling deep learning bullshit which results in profits being paid out to a bunch of intelligent, greedy and unwise people.

I just hope that when the intelligent people finally become wise, it won't be too late.

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#27

Post by yankoff »

baccredited wrote: post #15

If I had a winning strategy why would I feed it to Numerai instead of instavest.com?

You don't know if you have a winning strategy. You'd have to put your own money and take a risk to find out. Plus you'd have to take care of data and feature engineering yourself.

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#28

Post by numbas »

lordnacho wrote: post #16

Hedge fund guy here. - You need to know something about the domain in order to make sensible predictions. Is the data daily? Is it per second? Is it ticks? You can't build a sensible model if you don't know that, even if you have good predictions. Relative cost will vary a lot between timescales. - It matters what the features are. Maybe there's some clever reason why it doesn't, but until I hear why I'm going to tak…

You don't really need to know what the features mean to make a good model. Even if only you knew the meaning of the features you'd still get beaten by someone using a blackbox approach. This is exactly what happened to the owner. He worked as a quant making predictions on this expensive dataset, and in the first tournament he was beaten by around 50 other modelers using anonymized features.

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#29

Post by numbas »

baccredited wrote: post #15

If I had a winning strategy why would I feed it to Numerai instead of instavest.com?

Because you don't have capital, risk-adversity, and access to the (expensive) dataset. You only have encrypted predictions, which are worthless for you.

Re: Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

#30

Post by yankoff »

bgitarts wrote: post #7

The training set just has anonymized features. Data scientists generally would like to know the nature of the data they are working with. Does the site at any point give access to the labeled featured?

You don't necessarily have to know the meaning of the features to build a successful model. That has been done on Kaggle a lot.
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