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Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

medium.com

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Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#4

But why did the machine want to go long Salmar ASA?

The same reason any trader wants to go long Salmar ASA: Their model says so. Except with numerai, the model is a machine-learning algorithm instead of a human with their bias and intuition.

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#6

But why did the machine want to go long Salmar ASA?

Does it matter? The machine saw a pattern, and it responded to the pattern. We don't need to know.

If the machine is "anonymous", it does matter. Scenario #1: A human gets insider information that a Solar City will be bought. Makes his anonymous "AI machine" predict that Solar City is a great stock to buy!

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? The machine saw a pattern, and it responded to the pattern. We don't need to know.

If the machine is "anonymous", it does matter. Scenario #1: A human gets insider information that a Solar City will be bought. Makes his anonymous "AI machine" predict that Solar City is a great stock to buy!

That's not possible. The data is encrypted. None of the participants can see which stocks (or anything) about the data they train with. Numerai turns stock prediction into a pure ML problem.

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the machine is "anonymous", it does matter. Scenario #1: A human gets insider information that a Solar City will be bought. Makes his anonymous "AI machine" predict that Solar City is a great stock to buy!

That's not possible. The data is encrypted. None of the participants can see which stocks (or anything) about the data they train with. Numerai turns stock prediction into a pure ML problem.

Doesn't the encrypted chart still need to display price history or volume? If so it seems like it'd be a trivial task to match it up with its real-world counterpart.

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not possible. The data is encrypted. None of the participants can see which stocks (or anything) about the data they train with. Numerai turns stock prediction into a pure ML problem.

Doesn't the encrypted chart still need to display price history or volume? If so it seems like it'd be a trivial task to match it up with its real-world counterpart.

It would be easy to match an obfuscated stock market dataset with some third party dataset, and this has happened on many Kaggle competitions (data leaks). That's why the encryption here is important.

Re: Numerai, a hedge fund built by a community of anonymous data scientists

#10
Interesting idea. Not that crowd driven investment algorithms are new, but I have not seen a machine learning one before.

What really ennoys me about this kind of businesses is that they pay tiny prices and shut the competitions once they have found what they were looking for, however Numerai might be completely different in that regard and I wish them the best!

Btw: The article kind of conveys the feeling as if machine learning is something new to the hedge fund business and that's absolutely not the case. There are already smart people working on really complex algorithms since a couple of years now.

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