Making Good on LSTMs' Unfulfilled Promise

Daniel Philps, Artur d'Avila Garcez and Tillman Weyde

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: LSTMs promise much to financial time-series analysis, temporal and cross-sectional inference, but we find that they do not deliver in a real-world financial management task. We examine an alternative called Continual Learning (CL), a memory-augmented approach, which can provide transparent explanations, i.e. which memory did what and when. This work has implications for many financial applications including credit, time-varying fairness in decision making and more. We make three important new observations. Firstly, as well as being more explainable, time-series CL approaches outperform LSTMs as well as a simple sliding window learner using feed-forward neural networks (FFNN). Secondly, we show that CL based on a sliding window learner (FFNN) is more effective than CL based on a sequential learner (LSTM). Thirdly, we examine how real-world, time-series noise impacts several similarity approaches used in CL memory addressing. We provide these insights using an approach called Continual Learning Augmentation (CLA) tested on a complex real-world problem, emerging market equities investment decision making. CLA provides a test-bed as it can be based on different types of time-series learners, allowing testing of LSTM and FFNN learners side by side. CLA is also used to test several distance approaches used in a memory recall-gate: Euclidean distance (ED), dynamic time warping (DTW), auto-encoders (AE) and a novel hybrid approach, warp-AE. We find that ED under-performs DTW and AE but warp-AE shows the best overall performance in a real-world financial task.

Date: 2019-11, Revised 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp
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