Tag: Risks & Rewards

Deep Learning for Liability-Driven Investment

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.soa.org/sections/investment/investment-newsletter/2022/february/rr-2022-02-shang/

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Excerpt:

This article summarizes key points from the recently published research paper “Deep Learning for Liability-Driven Investment,” which was sponsored by the Committee on Finance Research of the Society of Actuaries. The paper applies reinforcement learning and deep learning techniques to liability-driven investment (LDI). The full paper is available at https://www.soa.org/globalassets/assets/files/resources/research-report/2021/liability-driven-investment.pdf.

LDI is a key investment approach adopted by insurance companies and defined benefit (DB) pension funds. However, the complex structure of the liability portfolio and the volatile nature of capital markets make strategic asset allocation very challenging. On one hand, the optimization of a dynamic asset allocation strategy is difficult to achieve with dynamic programming, whose assumption as to liability evolution is often too simplified. On the other hand, using a grid-searching approach to find the best asset allocation or path to such an allocation is too computationally intensive, even if one restricts the choices to just a few asset classes.

Artificial intelligence is a promising approach for addressing these challenges. Using deep learning models and reinforcement learning (RL) to construct a framework for learning the optimal dynamic strategic asset allocation plan for LDI, one can design a stochastic experimental framework of the economic system as shown in Figure 1. In this framework, the program can identify appropriate strategy candidates by testing varying asset allocation strategies over time.

Author(s): Kailan Shang

Publication Date: February 2022

Publication Site: Risks & Rewards, SOA

What Machine Learning Can Do for You

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.soa.org/sections/investment/investment-newsletter/2022/february/rr-2022-02-romoff/

Excerpt:

Some ML algorithms (e.g., random forests) work very nicely with missing data. No data cleaning is required when using these algorithms. In addition to not breaking down amid missing data, these algorithms use the fact of “missingness” as a feature to predict with. This compensates for when the missing points are not randomly missing.

Or, rather than dodge the problem, although that might be the best approach, you can impute the missing values and work from there. Here, very simple ML algorithms that look for the nearest data point (K-Nearest Neighbors) and infer its value work well. Simplicity here can be optimal because the modeling in data cleaning should not be mixed with the modeling in forecasting.

There are also remedies for missing data in time series. The challenge of time series data is that relationships exist, not just between variables, but between variables and their preceding states. And, from the point of view of a historical data point, relationships exist with the future states of the variables.

For the sake of predicting missing values, a data set can be augmented by including lagged values and negative-lagged values (i.e., future values). This, now-wider, augmented data set will have correlated predictors. The regularization trick can be used to forecast missing points with the available data. And, a strategy of repeatedly sampling, forecasting, and then averaging the forecasts can be used. Or, a similar turnkey approach is to use principal component analysis (PCA) following a similar strategy where a meta-algorithm will repeatedly impute, project, and refit until the imputed points stop changing. This is easier said than done, but it is doable.

Author(s): David Romoff

Publication Date: February 2022

Publication Site: Risks & Rewards, SOA