This volume selects the best contributions from the Fourth International Conference on Neural Networks in the Capital Markets (NNCM). The conference brought together academics from several disciplines with strategists and decision makers from the financial industries.The various chapters present and compare new techniques from many areas including data mining, information systems, machine learning, and statistical artificial intelligence. The volume focuses on evaluating their usefulness for problems in computational finance and financial engineering.Applications — risk management; asset allocation; dynamic trading and hedging; forecasting; trading cost control. Markets — equity; foreign exchange; bond; commodity; derivatives; Approaches — data mining; statistical AI; machine learning; Monte Carlo simulation; bootstrapping; genetic algorithms; nonparametric methods; fuzzy logic.The chapters emphasizes in-depth and comparative evaluation with established approaches.

This volume selects the best contributions from the Fourth International Conference on Neural Networks in the Capital Markets (NNCM). The conference brought together academics from several disciplines with strategists and decision makers from the financial industries.The various chapters present and compare new techniques from many areas including data mining, information systems, machine learning, and statistical artificial intelligence. The volume focuses on evaluating their usefulness for problems in computational finance and financial engineering.Applications — risk management; asset allocation; dynamic trading and hedging; forecasting; trading cost control. Markets — equity; foreign exchange; bond; commodity; derivatives; Approaches — data mining; statistical AI; machine learning; Monte Carlo simulation; bootstrapping; genetic algorithms; nonparametric methods; fuzzy logic.The chapters emphasizes in-depth and comparative evaluation with established approaches.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2001, held in Hong Kong, China in April 2001. The 38 revised full papers and 22 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 152 submissions. The book offers topical sections on Web mining, text mining, applications and tools, concept hierarchies, feature selection, interestingness, sequence mining, spatial and temporal mining, association mining, classification and rule induction, clustering, and advanced topics and new methods.

This volume contains selected papers that were presented at the International Conference COMPUTATIONAL FINANCE 1997 held at London Business School on December 15-17 1997. Formerly known as Neural Networks in the Capital Markets (NNCM), this series of meetings has emerged as a truly multi-disciplinary international conference and provided an international focus for innovative research on the application of a multiplicity of advanced decision technologies to many areas of financial engineering. It has drawn upon theoretical advances in financial economics and robust methodological developments in the statistical, econometric and computer sciences. To reflect its multi-disciplinary nature, the NNCM conference has adopted the new title COMPUTATIONAL FINANCE. The papers in this volume are organised in six parts. Market Dynamics and Risk, Trading and Arbitrage strategies, Volatility and Options, Term-Structure and Factor models, Corporate Distress Models and Advances on Methodology. This years' acceptance rate (38%) reflects both the increasing interest in the conference and the Programme Committee's efforts to improve the quality of the meeting year-on-year. I would like to thank the members of the programme committee for their efforts in refereeing the papers. I also would like to thank the members of the computational finance group at London Business School and particularly Neil Burgess, Peter Bolland, Yves Bentz, and Nevil Towers for organising the meeting.

This book covers the techniques of data mining, knowledge discovery, genetic algorithms, neural networks, bootstrapping, machine learning, and Monte Carlo simulation. Computational finance, an exciting new cross-disciplinary research area, draws extensively on the tools and techniques of computer science, statistics, information systems, and financial economics. This book covers the techniques of data mining, knowledge discovery, genetic algorithms, neural networks, bootstrapping, machine learning, and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods are applied to a wide range of problems in finance, including risk management, asset allocation, style analysis, dynamic trading and hedging, forecasting, and option pricing. The book is based on the sixth annual international conference Computational Finance 1999, held at New York University's Stern School of Business.

X Table of Contents Table of Contents XI XII Table of Contents Table of Contents XIII XIV Table of Contents Table of Contents XV XVI Table of Contents K.S. Leung, L.-W. Chan, and H. Meng (Eds.): IDEAL 2000, LNCS 1983, pp. 3›8, 2000. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000 4 J. Sinkkonen and S. Kaski Clustering by Similarity in an Auxiliary Space 5 6 J. Sinkkonen and S. Kaski Clustering by Similarity in an Auxiliary Space 7 0.6 1.5 0.4 1 0.2 0.5 0 0 10 100 1000 10000 10 100 1000 Mutual information (bits) Mutual information (bits) 8 J. Sinkkonen and S. Kaski 20 10 0 0.1 0.3 0.5 0.7 Mutual information (mbits) Analyses on the Generalised Lotto-Type Competitive Learning Andrew Luk St B&P Neural Investments Pty Limited, Australia Abstract, In generalised lotto-type competitive learning algorithm more than one winner exist. The winners are divided into a number of tiers (or divisions), with each tier being rewarded differently. All the losers are penalised (which can be equally or differently). In order to study the various properties of the generalised lotto-type competitive learning, a set of equations, which governs its operations, is formulated. This is then used to analyse the stability and other dynamic properties of the generalised lotto-type competitive learning.

It is our belief that researchers and practitioners acquire, through experience and word-of-mouth, techniques and heuristics that help them successfully apply neural networks to di cult real world problems. Often these \tricks" are theo- tically well motivated. Sometimes they are the result of trial and error. However, their most common link is that they are usually hidden in people’s heads or in the back pages of space-constrained conference papers. As a result newcomers to the eld waste much time wondering why their networks train so slowly and perform so poorly. This book is an outgrowth of a 1996 NIPS workshop called Tricks of the Trade whose goal was to begin the process of gathering and documenting these tricks. The interest that the workshop generated motivated us to expand our collection and compile it into this book. Although we have no doubt that there are many tricks we have missed, we hope that what we have included will prove to be useful, particularly to those who are relatively new to the eld. Each chapter contains one or more tricks presented by a given author (or authors). We have attempted to group related chapters into sections, though we recognize that the di erent sections are far from disjoint. Some of the chapters (e.g., 1, 13, 17) contain entire systems of tricks that are far more general than the category they have been placed in.