LG-Trader: Stock trading decision support based on feature selection by weighted localized generalization error model

Stock trading is an important financial activity of human society. Machine learning techniques are adopted to provide trading decision support by predicting the stock price or trading signals of the next day. Decisions are made by analyzing technical indices and fundamental analysis of companies. There are two major machine learning research problems for stock trading decision support: classifier architecture selection and feature selection. In this work, we propose the LG-Trader which will deal with these two problems simultaneously using a genetic algorithm minimizing a new Weighted Localized Generalization Error (wL-GEM). An issue being ignored in current machine learning based stock trading researches is the imbalance among buy, hold and sell decisions. Usually hold decision is the majority in comparison to both buy and sell decisions. So, the wL-GEM is proposed to balance classes by penalizing heavier for generalization error being made in minority classes. The feature selection based on wL-GEM helps to select most useful technical indices among choices for each stock. Experimental results demonstrate that the LG-Trader yields higher profits and rates of return in both stock and index trading. & 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.