SITMO Machine Learning | Quantitative Finance

Category: Machine Learning

Optimal Labeling in Trading: Bridging the Gap Between Supervised and Reinforcement Learning

March 10, 2025 /

When building trading strategies, a crucial decision is how to translate market information into trading actions.

Traditional supervised learning approaches tackle this by predicting price movements directly, essentially guessing if the price will move up or down.

Typically, we decide on labels in supervised learning by asking something like: “Will the price rise next week?” or “Will it increase more than 2% over the next few days?” While these are intuitive choices, they often seem arbitrarily tweaked and overlook the real implications on trading strategies. Choices like these silently influence trading frequency, transaction costs, risk exposure, and strategy performance, without clearly tying these outcomes to specific label modeling decisions. There’s a gap here between the supervised learning stage (forecasting) and the actual trading decisions, which resemble reinforcement learning actions.

In this post, I present a straightforward yet rigorous solution that bridges this gap, by formulating label selection itself as an optimization problem. Instead of guessing or relying on intuition, labels are derived from explicitly optimizing a defined trading performance objective -like returns or Sharpe ratio- while respecting realistic constraints such as transaction costs or position limits. The result is labeling that is no longer arbitrary, but transparently optimal and directly tied to trading performance.

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Parameter Grid-searching with Python’s itertools

December 29, 2020 /

Python’s Itertools offers a great solution when you want to do a grid-search for optimal hyperparameter values, -or in general generate sets of experiments-.

In the code fragment below we generate experiment settings (key-value pairs stored in dictionaries) for all combinations of batch sizes and learning rates.

import itertools

# General settings
base_settings = {'epochs': 10}

# Grid search
grid = {
    'batch_size': [32, 64, 128],
    'learning_rate': [1E-4, 1E-3, 1E-2]
}

# Loop over al grid search combinations
for values in itertools.product(*grid.values()):
    point = dict(zip(grid.keys(), values))

    # merge the general settings
    settings = {**base_settings, **point}

    print(settings)

output:

{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 32, 'learning_rate': 0.0001}
{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 32, 'learning_rate': 0.001}
{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 32, 'learning_rate': 0.01}
{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 64, 'learning_rate': 0.0001}
{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 64, 'learning_rate': 0.001}
{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 64, 'learning_rate': 0.01}
{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 128, 'learning_rate': 0.0001}
{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 128, 'learning_rate': 0.001}
{'epochs': 10, 'batch_size': 128, 'learning_rate': 0.01}

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