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Discussion Paper
Hedge Fund Return Prediction and Fund Selection: A Machine-Learning Approach
A machine-learning approach is employed to forecast hedge fund returns and perform individual hedge fund selection within major hedge fund style categories. Hedge fund selection is treated as a cross-sectional supervised learning process based on direct forecasts of future returns. The inputs to the machine-learning models are observed hedge fund characteristics. Various learning processes including the lasso, random forest methods, gradient boosting methods, and deep neural networks are applied to predict fund performance. They all outperform the corresponding style index as well as a ...
Working Paper
Machine Learning, the Treasury Yield Curve and Recession Forecasting
We use machine learning methods to examine the power of Treasury term spreads and other financial market and macroeconomic variables to forecast US recessions, vis-à-vis probit regression. In particular we propose a novel strategy for conducting cross-validation on classifiers trained with macro/financial panel data of low frequency and compare the results to those obtained from standard k-folds cross-validation. Consistent with the existing literature we find that, in the time series setting, forecast accuracy estimates derived from k-folds are biased optimistically, and cross-validation ...
Working Paper
Parallel Trends Forest: Data-Driven Control Sample Selection in Difference-in-Differences
This paper introduces parallel trends forest, a novel approach to selecting optimal control samples when using difference-in-differences (DiD) in a relatively long panel data with little randomization in treatment assignment. Our method uses machine learning techniques to find control units that best meet the parallel trends assumption. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods, particularly with noisy, granular data. Applying the parallel trends forest to analyze the impact of post-trade transparency in corporate bond markets, we find that it produces more robust ...