Numerai walkthrough: Quantitative Analysis & Machine learning for fun and profit.

If you believe that action and practice are better than theory and have little to no experience in the field of machine learning and quantitative analysis (but a healthy interest) , this might be the post for you, for the rest it is a look into a probable future where one more thing could become decentralized and open sourced: Wall Street.

There are 2 main ideas at play here, so I’ll try giving you a birds eye view of both :

1. Numerai: Within the world of finance, hedge funds are a group of investors that plunk money into a basket of financial instruments and investments with hopes of having a return, a $3 Trillion Dollar competitive industry. Within this industry Numerai is one of the first experiments in open sourcing at some level the management and decision of buying and selling investments.
2. Quantitavie Analysis & Machine Learning: Quantitative analysis in finance employs statistical & mathematical models to predict and evaluate the price and value of financial instruments, in a nutshell various numbers representing some feature of the instrument go in, and a prediction or score comes out, said prediction or valuation then informs the decision making on the funds capital (buying,selling, holding etc) Machine learning which is everywhere these days is but…