Online portfolio management via deep reinforcement learning with high-frequency data

Recently, models that based on Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) have yielded superior results in many sequence modeling tasks. The ability of Transformer to capture long-range dependencies and interactions makes it possible to apply it in the field of portfolio management (PM). However, the built-in quadratic complexity of the Transformer prevents its direct application to the PM task. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based PM framework called LSRE-CAAN, with two important components: a long sequence representations extractor and a cross-asset attention network. Direct Policy Gradient is used to solve the sequential decision problem in the PM process. We conduct numerical experiments in three aspects using four different cryptocurrency datasets, and the empirical results show that our framework is more effective than both traditional and state-of-the-art (SOTA) online portfolio strategies, achieving a 6x return on the best dataset. In terms of risk metrics, our framework has an average volatility risk of 0.46 and an average maximum drawdown risk of 0.27 across the four datasets, both of which are lower than the vast majority of SOTA strategies. In addition, while the vast majority of SOTA strategies maintain a poor turnover rate of approximately greater than 50% on average, our framework enjoys a relatively low turnover rate on all datasets, efficiency analysis illustrates that our framework no longer has the quadratic dependency limitation.     

Federated learning review: Fundamentals,enabling technologies,and future applications

Federated Learning (FL) has been foundational in improving the performance of a wide range of applications since it was first introduced by Google. Some of the most prominent and commonly used FL-powered applications are Android’s Gboard for predictive text and Google Assistant. FL can be defined as a setting that makes on-device, collaborative Machine Learning possible. A wide range of literature has studied FL technical considerations, frameworks, and limitations with several works presenting a survey of the prominent literature on FL. However, prior surveys have focused on technical considerations and challenges of FL, and there has been a limitation in more recent work that presents a comprehensive overview of the status and future trends of FL in applications and markets. In this survey, we introduce the basic fundamentals of FL, describing its underlying technologies, architectures, system challenges, and privacy-preserving methods. More importantly, the contribution of this work is in scoping a wide variety of FL current applications and future trends in technology and markets today. We present a classification and clustering of literature progress in FL in application to technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, blockchain, Natural Language Processing, autonomous vehicles, and resource allocation, as well as in application to market use cases in domains of Data Science, healthcare, education, and industry. We discuss future open directions and challenges in FL within recommendation engines, autonomous vehicles, IoT, battery management, privacy, fairness, personalization, and the role of FL for governments and public sectors. By presenting a comprehensive review of the status and prospects of FL, this work serves as a reference point for researchers and practitioners to explore FL applications under a wide range of domains.     

Making use of cloud computing for healthcare provision: Opportunities and challenges

Cloud or utility computing is an emerging new computing paradigm designed to deliver numerous computing services through networked media such as the Web. This approach offers several advantages to potential users such as “metered” use (i.e., pay-as-you-go) which offers scalability, online delivery of software and virtual hardware services (e.g., collaboration programmes, virtual servers, virtual storage devices) which would enable organizations to obviate the need to own, maintain and update their software and hardware infrastructures. The flexibility of this emerging computing service has opened many possibilities for organizations that did not exist before. Among those organizations are those engaged in healthcare provision. The aim of this article is to shed some light on this development and explore the potential (and future) of cloud computing in contributing to the advancement of healthcare provision. A small case study will also be presented and discussed.     

中文科技政策文本分类：增强的TextCNN视角*

近年尽管针对中文本文分类的研究成果不少，但基于深度学习对中文政策等长文本进行自动分类的研究还不多见。为此，借鉴和拓展传统的数据增强方法，提出集成新时代人民日报分词语料库（NEPD）、简单数据增强（EDA）算法、word2vec和文本卷积神经网络（TextCNN）的NEWT新型计算框架；实证部分，基于中国地方政府发布的科技政策文本进行算法校验。实验结果显示，在取词长度分别为500、750和1 000词的情况下，应用NEWT算法对中文科技政策文本进行分类的效果优于RCNN、Bi-LSTM和CapsNet等传统深度学习模型，F1值的平均提升比例超过13%；同时，NEWT在较短取词长度下能够实现全文输入的近似效果，可以部分改善传统深度学习模型在中文长文本自动分类任务中的计算效率。     

MRC-Sum: An MRC framework for extractive summarization of academic articles in natural sciences and medicine

Extractive summarization for academic articles in natural sciences and medicine has attracted attention for a long time. However, most existing extractive summarization models often process academic articles with sentence classification models, which are hard to produce comprehensive summaries. To address this issue, we explore a new view to solve the extractive summarization of academic articles in natural sciences and medicine by taking it as a question-answering process. We propose a novel framework, MRC-Sum, where the extractive summarization for academic articles in natural sciences and medicine is cast as an MRC (Machine Reading Comprehension) task. To instantiate MRC-Sum, article-summary pairs in the summarization datasets are firstly reconstructed into (Question, Answer, Context) triples in the MRC task. Several questions are designed to cover the main aspects (e.g. Background, Method, Result, Conclusion) of the articles in natural sciences and medicine. A novel strategy is proposed to solve the problem of the non-existence of the ground truth answer spans. Then MRC-Sum is trained on the reconstructed datasets and large-scale pre-trained models. During the inference stage, four answer spans of the predefined questions are given by MRC-Sum and concatenated to form the final summary for each article. Experiments on three publicly available benchmarks, i.e., the Covid, PubMed, and arXiv datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of MRC-Sum. Specifically, MRC-Sum outperforms advanced extractive summarization baselines on the Covid dataset and achieves competitive results on the PubMed and arXiv datasets. We also propose a novel metric, COMPREHS, to automatically evaluate the comprehensiveness of the system summaries for academic articles in natural sciences and medicine. Abundant experiments are conducted and verified the reliability of the proposed metric. And the results of the COMPREHS metric show that MRC-Sum is able to generate more comprehensive summaries than the baseline models.     

RGAN-EL: A GAN and ensemble learning-based hybrid approach for imbalanced data classification

Imbalanced sample distribution is usually the main reason for the performance degradation of machine learning algorithms. Based on this, this study proposes a hybrid framework (RGAN-EL) combining generative adversarial networks and ensemble learning method to improve the classification performance of imbalanced data. Firstly, we propose a training sample selection strategy based on roulette wheel selection method to make GAN pay more attention to the class overlapping area when fitting the sample distribution. Secondly, we design two kinds of generator training loss, and propose a noise sample filtering method to improve the quality of generated samples. Then, minority class samples are oversampled using the improved RGAN to obtain a balanced training sample set. Finally, combined with the ensemble learning strategy, the final training and prediction are carried out. We conducted experiments on 41 real imbalanced data sets using two evaluation indexes: F1-score and AUC. Specifically, we compare RGAN-EL with six typical ensemble learning; RGAN is compared with three typical GAN models. The experimental results show that RGAN-EL is significantly better than the other six ensemble learning methods, and RGAN is greatly improved compared with three classical GAN models.     

TCACNet: Temporal and channel attention convolutional network for motor imagery classification of EEG-based BCI

Brain–computer interface (BCI) is a promising intelligent healthcare technology to improve human living quality across the lifespan, which enables assistance of movement and communication, rehabilitation of exercise and nerves, monitoring sleep quality, fatigue and emotion. Most BCI systems are based on motor imagery electroencephalogram (MI-EEG) due to its advantages of sensory organs affection, operation at free will and etc. However, MI-EEG classification, a core problem in BCI systems, suffers from two critical challenges: the EEG signal’s temporal non-stationarity and the nonuniform information distribution over different electrode channels. To address these two challenges, this paper proposes TCACNet, a temporal and channel attention convolutional network for MI-EEG classification. TCACNet leverages a novel attention mechanism module and a well-designed network architecture to process the EEG signals. The former enables the TCACNet to pay more attention to signals of task-related time slices and electrode channels, supporting the latter to make accurate classification decisions. We compare the proposed TCACNet with other state-of-the-art deep learning baselines on two open source EEG datasets. Experimental results show that TCACNet achieves 11.4% and 7.9% classification accuracy improvement on two datasets respectively. Additionally, TCACNet achieves the same accuracy as other baselines with about 50% less training data. In terms of classification accuracy and data efficiency, the superiority of the TCACNet over advanced baselines demonstrates its practical value for BCI systems.     

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges,opportunities, and agenda for research,practice and policy

As far back as the industrial revolution, significant development in technical innovation has succeeded in transforming numerous manual tasks and processes that had been in existence for decades where humans had reached the limits of physical capacity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers this same transformative potential for the augmentation and potential replacement of human tasks and activities within a wide range of industrial, intellectual and social applications. The pace of change for this new AI technological age is staggering, with new breakthroughs in algorithmic machine learning and autonomous decision-making, engendering new opportunities for continued innovation. The impact of AI could be significant, with industries ranging from: finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, supply chain, logistics and utilities, all potentially disrupted by the onset of AI technologies. The study brings together the collective insight from a number of leading expert contributors to highlight the significant opportunities, realistic assessment of impact, challenges and potential research agenda posed by the rapid emergence of AI within a number of domains: business and management, government, public sector, and science and technology. This research offers significant and timely insight to AI technology and its impact on the future of industry and society in general, whilst recognising the societal and industrial influence on pace and direction of AI development.