Task-Based Learning via Task-Oriented Prediction Network with Applications in Finance

Task-Based Learning via Task-Oriented Prediction Network with Applications in Finance

Di Chen, Yada Zhu, Xiaodong Cui, Carla Gomes

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Special Track on AI in FinTech. Pages 4476-4482. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/617

Real-world applications often involve domain-specific and task-based performance objectives that are not captured by the standard machine learning losses, but are critical for decision making. A key challenge for direct integration of more meaningful domain and task-based evaluation criteria into an end-to-end gradient-based training process is the fact that often such performance objectives are not necessarily differentiable and may even require additional decision-making optimization processing. We propose the Task-Oriented Prediction Network (TOPNet), an end-to-end learning scheme that automatically integrates task-based evaluation criteria into the learning process via a learnable surrogate loss function, which directly guides the model towards the task-based goal. A major benefit of the proposed TOPNet learning scheme lies in its capability of automatically integrating non-differentiable evaluation criteria, which makes it particularly suitable for diversified and customized task-based evaluation criteria in real-world tasks. We validate the performance of TOPNet on two real-world financial prediction tasks, revenue surprise forecasting and credit risk modeling. The experimental results demonstrate that TOPNet significantly outperforms both traditional modeling with standard losses and modeling with hand-crafted heuristic differentiable surrogate losses.
Keywords:
Foundation for AI in FinTech: Computational intelligence for FinTech
Foundation for AI in FinTech: General