Desired ML Career and Interview Skills
A Short Series to navigate ML careers skills and competencies in Quants, Risk & Financial Engineering
Embark on a journey to enhance your "Desired ML Career and Interview Skills" with our insightful short series. Navigate through crucial interview questions, each with strategic answers tailored to empower you in the competitive arenas of Quants, Risk Management, and Financial Engineering. Elevate your preparation and confidently step into the world of machine learning careers within the dynamic landscape of quantitative finance.
INTERVIEW FOCAL POINTS
Can you elaborate upon the shortcomings of current numerical methods for quant finance and derivative pricing?
Response Keynotes
- Monte Carlo methods need massive computational power and resources (high computational resources i.e. hardware risks remaining unused outside of active trading hours)
- Monte Carlo methods have slow to convergence rate.
- Monte Carlo methods are also unable to re-use previous computations: even small perturbations in one input requires starting from scratch.
- Monte Carlo methods unable to generate real-time analytics about asset dynamics and pricing behavior.
Can you call-out the advantages of using ML technique based algorithms over the current numerical methods (Monte-Carlo or Finite Difference Method) for solving quant finance and derivative pricing problems?
Response Keynotes
- ML algorithms are well-capable of transfer learning, wherein a model (or part of it) is re-trained for an application similar, but not identical to, its original purpose. A ML model can potentially be trained to approximate valuation for likely input parameter ranges on a single date — and recalibrated overnight.
- ML algorithms can be designed to dynamically auto-parameterize and auto-calibrate with the change in market data.
- ML brings in highly-potent computational functionalities like automatic differentiation (AD) found in most ML programming libraries. AD can deliver accurate model partial derivatives at little to no extra computational cost. Not only can a well-trained ML model then potentially value derivatives fast and accurately, it can also bypass FDM in evaluating the model input sensitivities for approximating true model sensitivities.
Can you call-out the any cutting edge supervised ML-base classifier method exploited to address problems in exotic derivative pricing ?
Response Keynotes
- Support Vector Machine (SVM) used to predict the outcome of exotic options. Like the case of double no-touch is a binary option with a constant payout earned if and only if the underlying asset price (mostly Forex) remains between a predefined lower and upper bound until expiration.
- Given the not continuous future payoff specified as “all-or-nothing” the SVM can be used to separate the two classes corresponding to the binary option outcome. As these classes are not linearly separable, one needs a kernel to predict the outcome. The features selected to train the model could be the average directional index and the ratio between realized volatility over implied volatility
Can you call-out the any cutting edge supervised ML-based Neural Network method exploited to address problems in Investment Banking structured product ?
Response Keynotes
- Structured products like Phoenix Autocalls which are traded over-the-counter (OTC) with institutional and private investors as part of larger structured products can be priced using Deep Learning algorithms like Neural Networks.
- Phoenix Autocalls depend on the price movements of multiple other financial assets in complex ways hence requires huge number of features and parameters to develop a pricing model. Further, being OTC, the payoff can be specialized in various different ways, The first-order sensitivities of these derivatives are evaluated for risk- management purposes, with sensitivities to the spot price (current price) and implied volatility of each underlying instruments particularly important; as well as sensitivity to time, measured by the interday (overnight) change in contract value. Present (theoretical) value and sensitivities to underlying asset price & volatility are continuously updated during market hours, requiring both fast and accurate valuation at a level not possible using Monte Carlo, but theoretically possible by deep learning.
Can you call-out the any cutting edge ML unsupervised methods exploited to address problems in investment fund strategy?
Response Keynotes
- Due to the variety of hedge fund—and, therefore, investing strategies—it can be hard for investors to classify such investment vehicles. Moreover, hedge funds tend to reveal less information than other type of funds as they do not fall under the same disclosure requirements.
- To classify hedge funds, predefined classes would not be able to manage correctly future type of hedge funds. Hence, ML clustering methods, such as k-means, have been used to overcome cluster hedge funds by strategies like Event- Drive, Macro, Global-Arbitrage etc. The features considered are based on available characteristics of hedge funds, such as asset classes, size, fees, leverage and liquidity.
1. Can you share and elaborate on the ML use cases for Market Risk forecasting problem-sets?
Prediction is more or less like Pattern Recognition and Deep Neural Networks (DNN) is a power tool for Pattern Recognition used for Market Index Price & Volatility Forecasting
- S&P 500 Price Index (SPX) & S&P 500 VIX Volatility Index
- FTSE 10, DAX , CAC 40 Price Indices
- MSCI Emerging Markets Price Index
- Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index - Chinese Equity Index
- KOSPI Price Index - South Korean Equity Index
2. Can you call-out the advantages of Deep Learning (Deep Neural Networks)?
Deep Neural Network (DNN) Advantages
- Generalization & Regularization ability
- Robustness & Stability
- Mapping of input/output
- Assumptions Free Data-Driven Modelling
- Flexibility & Scalability
3. Can you call out the disadvantages of Deep Learning (Deep Neural Networks)?
Drawbacks of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs)
- Difficult to understand inner workings (lacks transparency in terms of parameterization and estimation)
- Tendency to over-predict and fit data excessively (overfitting)
- Requirement for machine learning expertise to choose input elements and hyperparameters
- Considerable amount of time needed for training (due to the computationally intensive and time-consuming nature of training large parameters)
4. Can you cover a use-case RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) LSTM Architecture to solve a sequential learning task?
Data Extraction & Description: Sourced VIX i.e. S&P 500 Volatility Index [^VIX] using Yahoo Finance as an interface. | ||||
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Data Period: Spanning from 1st Jan 1971 to 30th Apr 2022 | Data Frequency: Daily VIX Index Price Values | Total Observations: 8146 records (250 trading days per year) | Total Columns: 7 'Open', 'High', 'Low', 'Close', 'Adj Close', 'Volume' | Final Column Used: 'Adj Close' is VIX price adjusted by averaging for last 1 hour |
Data Exploratory Analysis & Visualization | ||||
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Seasonal Decomposition: Daily VIX Price Series ('Adj Close') - VIX Price, Trend, Seasonality & Residuals |
Averaging of % VIX Price Change Over 250 days rolling window to overcome Volatility Clustering |
Plotting VIX_mean 250 & its Distribution |
Correlational Scatter Plot b/w VIX_mean 250 & its lags |
ACF & PACF Plots VIX_mean 250 |
Model Dataset Preparation | ||||
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Perform Stationarity Test AD-Fuller |
Apply Data Scaling Min-Max scaling on dataset |
Split Dataset Train (75%) & Test (25%) |
Visualise Periodic Spread Train Test Plot | Create a 3-d Tensor Needed for LSTM & GRU |
Model Design, Implementation & Application | ||||
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Base Model Fit on Train & Predict on Test using Auto ARIMA |
RNN Family ML Models LSTM, GRU & Hybrid LSTM-GRU |
Tuning RNN Hyperparameter No-of-Neurons, Activation Function etc. for RNN |
Train RNN Variants Train using Validation Loss as Early Stopping Criteria | Apply RNN Variants Apply each RNN-family variants on Test Set |
Model Performance Evaluation & Comparison | ||
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Model Epoch Training Evaluation Train v/s Validation RMSE & Loss |
Test Prediction Accuracy Plotting Projections v/s Actuals for Test Set |
Model Complexity & Accuracy Evaluation Measures: Trainable Parameters, Loss, RMSE & R-Square |