Stock classification is a challenging task due to high levels of noise and volatility of stocks returns. In this paper we show that using transfer learning can help with this task, by pre-training a model to extract universal features on the full universe of stocks of the S&P500 index and then transferring it to another model to directly learn a trading rule. Transferred models present more than double the risk-adjusted returns than their counterparts trained from zero. In addition, we propose the use of data augmentation on the feature space defined as the output of a pre-trained model (i.e. augmenting the aggregated time-series representation). We compare this augmentation approach with the standard one, i.e. augmenting the time-series in the input space. We show that augmentation methods on the feature space leads to 20% increase in risk-adjusted return compared to a model trained with transfer learning but without augmentation.
@article{arxiv.2011.04545,
title = {Augmenting transferred representations for stock classification},
author = {Elizabeth Fons and Paula Dawson and Xiao-jun Zeng and John Keane and Alexandros Iosifidis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.04545},
year = {2020}
}