Relation-Aware Transformer for Portfolio Policy Learning

Relation-Aware Transformer for Portfolio Policy Learning

Ke Xu, Yifan Zhang, Deheng Ye, Peilin Zhao, Mingkui Tan

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Special Track on AI in FinTech. Pages 4647-4653. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/641

Portfolio selection is an important yet challenging task in AI for FinTech. One of the key issues is how to represent the non-stationary price series of assets in a portfolio, which is important for portfolio decisions. The existing methods, however, fall short of capturing: 1) the complicated sequential patterns for asset price series and 2) the price correlations among multiple assets. In this paper, under a deep reinforcement learning paradigm for portfolio selection, we propose a novel Relation-aware Transformer (RAT) to handle these aspects. Specifically, being equipped with our newly developed attention modules, RAT is structurally innovated to capture both sequential patterns and asset correlations for portfolio selection. Based on the extracted sequential features, RAT is able to make profitable portfolio decisions regarding each asset via a newly devised leverage operation. Extensive experiments on real-world crypto-currency and stock datasets verify the state-of-the-art performance of RAT.
Keywords:
Foundation for AI in FinTech: Reinforcement learning for FinTech
AI for trading: AI for portfolio analytics
AI for wealth: AI for digital asset management