Teaching Financial Data Mining using Stocks and Futures Contracts

Financial data mining models is considered to be “the hardest way to make easy money.” Data miners are certainly motivated by the prospect of discovering a financial “Holy Grail.” However, designing and implementing a successful model poses many intellectual challenges. These include securing and cleaning data; acquiring a sufficient amount of financial domain knowledge; bounding the complexity of the problem; and properly validating results. Teaching financial data mining is especially difficult due to the student’s limited financial domain knowledge and the relatively short period (one semester) for building financial models. This paper describes an application of a financial data mining term project based on Stock and E-Mini futures contracts and discusses “lessons learned” from assigning similar term projects over six different semesters. Results of each case study results are presented and discussed.