Fact Check: Analyzing Financial Events from Multilingual News Sources

The explosion in the sheer magnitude and complexity of financial news data in recent years makes it increasingly challenging for investment analysts to extract valuable insights and perform analysis. We propose FactCheck in finance, a web-based news aggregator with deep learning models, to provide analysts with a holistic view of important financial events from multilingual news sources and extract events using an unsupervised clustering method. A web interface is provided to examine the credibility of news articles using a transformer-based fact-checker. The performance of the fact checker is evaluated using a dataset related to merger and acquisition (M&A) events and is shown to outperform several strong baselines.

Posterior Regularisation on Bayesian Hierarchical Mixture Clustering

We study a recent inferential framework, named posterior regularisation, on the Bayesian hierarchical mixture clustering (BHMC) model. This framework facilitates a simple way to impose extra constraints on a Bayesian model to overcome some weakness of the original model. It narrows the search space of the parameters of the Bayesian model through a formalism that imposes certain constraints on the features of the found solutions. In this paper, in order to enhance the separation of clusters, we apply posterior regularisation to impose max-margin constraints on the nodes at every level of the hierarchy. This paper shows how the framework integrates with BHMC and achieves the expected improvements over the original Bayesian model.

Generating Plausible Counterfactual Explanations for Deep Transformers in Financial Text Classification

Corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) account for billions of dollars of investment globally every year, and offer an interesting and challenging domain for artificial intelligence. However, in these highly sensitive domains, it is crucial to not only have a highly robust and accurate model, but be able to generate useful explanations to garner a users trust in the automated system. Regrettably, the recent research regarding eXplainable AI (XAI) in financial text classification has received little to no attention, and many current methods for generating textual-based explanations result in highly implausible explanations, which damage a users trust in the system. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel methodology for producing plausible counterfactual explanations, whilst exploring the regularization benefits of adversarial training on language models in the domain of FinTech. Exhaustive quantitative experiments demonstrate that not only does this approach improve the model accuracy when compared to the current state-of-the-art and human performance, but it also generates counterfactual explanations which are significantly more plausible based on human trials.

Penalized Maximum Likelihood Estimator for Mixture of von Mises-Fisher Distributions

The von Mises-Fisher distribution is one of the most widely used probability distributions to describe directional data. Finite mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions have found numerous applications. However, the likelihood function for the finite mixture of von Mises-Fisher distributions is unbounded and consequently the maximum likelihood estimation is not well defined. To address the problem of likelihood degeneracy, we consider a penalized maximum likelihood approach whereby a penalty function is incorporated. We prove strong consistency of the resulting estimator. An Expectation-Maximization algorithm for the penalized likelihood function is developed and simulation studies are performed to examine its performance.

Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process Intensity Modeling and Estimation using Measure Transport

Non-homogeneous Poisson processes are used in a wide range of scientific disciplines, ranging from the environmental sciences to the health sciences. Often, the central object of interest in a point process is the underlying intensity function. Here, we present a general model for the intensity function of a non-homogeneous Poisson process using measure transport. The model is built from a flexible bijective mapping that maps from the underlying intensity function of interest to a simpler reference intensity function. We enforce bijectivity by modeling the map as a composition of multiple simple bijective maps, and show that the model exhibits an important approximation property. Estimation of the flexible mapping is accomplished within an optimization framework, wherein computations are efficiently done using recent technological advances in deep learning and a graphics processing unit. Although we find that intensity function estimates obtained with our method are not necessarily superior to those obtained using conventional methods, the modeling representation brings with it other advantages such as facilitated point process simulation and uncertainty quantification. Modeling point processes in higher dimensions is also facilitated using our approach. We illustrate the use of our model on both simulated data, and a real data set containing the locations of seismic events near Fiji since 1964.

Universal Approximation on the Hypersphere

It is well known that any continuous probability density function on $mathbb{R}^m$ can be approximated arbitrarily well by a finite mixture of normal distributions, provided that the number of mixture components is sufficiently large. The von-Mises-Fisher distribution, defined on the unit hypersphere $S^m$ in $mathbb{R}^{m+1}$, has properties that are analogous to those of the multivariate normal on $mathbb{R}^{m+1}$. We prove that any continuous probability density function on $S^m$ can be approximated to arbitrary degrees of accuracy by a finite mixture of von-Mises-Fisher distributions.

Deep Compositional Spatial Models

Spatial processes with nonstationary and anisotropic covariance structure are often used when modelling, analysing and predicting complex environmental phenomena. Such processes may often be expressed as ones that have stationary and isotropic covariance structure on a warped spatial domain. However, the warping function is generally difficult to fit and not constrained to be injective, often resulting in `space-folding. Here, we propose modelling an injective warping function through a composition of multiple elemental injective functions in a deep-learning framework. We consider two cases; first, when these functions are known up to some weights that need to be estimated, and, second, when the weights in each layer are random. Inspired by recent methodological and technological advances in deep learning and deep Gaussian processes, we employ approximate Bayesian methods to make inference with these models using graphics processing units. Through simulation studies in one and two dimensions we show that the deep compositional spatial models are quick to fit, and are able to provide better predictions and uncertainty quantification than other deep stochastic models of similar complexity. We also show their remarkable capacity to model nonstationary, anisotropic spatial data using radiances from the MODIS instrument aboard the Aqua satellite.

Model-based clustering for random hypergraphs

A probabilistic model for random hypergraphs is introduced to represent unary, binary and higher order interactions among objects in real-world problems. This model is an extension of the Latent Class Analysis model, which captures clustering structures among objects. An EM (expectation maximization) algorithm with MM (minorization maximization) steps is developed to perform parameter estimation while a cross validated likelihood approach is employed to perform model selection. The developed model is applied to three real-world data sets where interesting results are obtained.

Modeling the social media relationships of Irish politicians using a generalized latent space stochastic blockmodel

Dail Eireann is the principal chamber of the Irish parliament. The 31st Dail Eireann is the principal chamber of the Irish parliament. The 31st Dail was in session from March 11th, 2011 to February 6th, 2016. Many of the members of the Dail were active on social media and many were Twitter users who followed other members of the Dail. The pattern of following amongst these politicians provides insights into political alignment within the Dail. We propose a new model, called the generalized latent space stochastic blockmodel, which extends and generalizes both the latent space model and the stochastic blockmodel to study social media connections between members of the Dail. The probability of an edge between two nodes in a network depends on their respective class labels as well as latent positions in an unobserved latent space. The proposed model is capable of representing transitivity, clustering, as well as disassortative mixing. A Bayesian method with Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling is proposed for estimation of model parameters. Model selection is performed using the WAIC criterion and models of different number of classes or dimensions of latent space are compared. We use the model to study Twitter following relationships of members of the Dail and interpret structure found in these relationships. We find that the following relationships amongst politicians is mainly driven by past and present political party membership. We also find that the modeling outputs are informative when studying voting within the Dail.