In statistical machine learning, the standard measure of accuracy for models is the prediction error, i.e. the expected loss on future examples. When the data distribution is unknown, it cannot be computed but several resampling methods, such as K-fold cross-validation can be used to obtain an...

Metric-based methods, which use unlabeled data to detect gross differences in behavior away from the training points, have recently been introduced for model selection, often yielding very significant improvements over alternatives (including cross-validation). We introduce extensions that take...

This paper studies an out-of-sample statistic for time-series prediction that is analogous to the widely used R2 in-sample statistic. We propose and study methods to estimate the variance of this out-of-sample statistic. We suggest that the out-of-sample statistic is more robust to...

To deal with the overfitting problems that occur when there are not enough examples compared to the number of input variables in supervised learning, traditional approaches are weight decay and greedy variable selection. An alternative that has recently started to attract attention is to keep...

The application of this work is to decision taking with financial time-series, using learning algorithms. The traditional approach is to train a model using a prediction criterion, such as minimizing the squared error between predictions and actual values of a dependent variable, or maximizing...

The price of an option should reflect the average value that a buyer receives for it, and also a risk premium. This report describes an empirical study for analysing these factors as a graphical and quantitative manner. The analysis focuses on the average difference between the price option and...

Incorporating prior knowledge of a particular task into the architecture of a learning algorithm can greatly improve generalization performance. We study here a case where we know that the function to be learned is non-decreasing in its two arguments and convex in one of them. For this purpose...

Input/Output Hidden Markov Models (IOHMMs) are conditional hidden Markov models in which the emission (and possibly the transition) probabilities can be conditioned on an input sequence. For example, these conditional distributions can be linear, logistic, or non-linear (using for example...

This report presents and proposes several methods to improve the capacity of generalization of the learning algorithms in a context of financial decision-making. These methods, overall, aim at controlling the capacity of the learning algorithms in order to limit the problem of the over-training,...

The non-parametric modelization of the stock options and other derivatives generated an increased interest over the past years. The goal of this paper is to predict the market price of an option from the same information as needed by the Black-Scholes formula. This is a continuation of more...