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The company the article refers to is https://numer.ai/about https://numer.ai/about From their homepage: "February 27th 2016, an artificial intelligence named
by aresant 10y ago
The company the article refers to is https://numer.ai/about https://numer.ai/about
From their homepage:
"February 27th 2016, an artificial intelligence named NCVSAI joined Numerai. . . He uses an untraceable email address. . . He is completely anonymous. His strongest prediction: buy Salmar ASA — a Norwegian salmon company. . . Numerai’s hedge fund went long Salmar ASA."
Ok, so how is this anything but an anonymous proxy to arbitrage insider information?
Wrap confidential, non-public information under the guise of developing "AI" for trading?
I am serious, I don't necessarily understand the need for the data scientists to maintain anonymity, seems like the only functional reason is to let them break the law?
- benmmurphy 10y agoThe numeri.ai data they give to their researchers is anonymised.
- nohat 10y agoThe data is anonymized too. Numerai could be playing a shell game, but it would require submitting their own solutions, or publishing confidential information, both presumably illegal (and particularly indefensible if caught).
- otoburb 10y ago"Though most of these data scientists are anonymous, a small handful are not, including [named individual] of Buffalo, New York." Most data scientists are anonymous, but they don't need to be. The datasets provided to the data scientists must be and are anonymized.
- markovbling 10y agoYou don't know what stocks your model is predicting to buy - it's all anonymized using homomorphic encryption
- acdha 10y agoHow many de-anonymization schemes have withstood more than casual attacks? There's so much stock data available that I wouldn't want to bet against someone using historical data to de-anonymize a stock and then place a bet using insider information. The use of ML would even give plausible deniability – just imagine a prosecutor thinking about the odds of successfully arguing that your model couldn't have produced that result?
- lkowalcz 10y agoI'm almost positive it's not using homomorphic encryption (at least in any real sense). It's misleading how they seem to suggest that they are, though.
- antognini 10y agoI've been participating in Numerai for a few months now. (I've only made some beer money from it, nothing serious.) When you get the data, you have no idea what it is. It's just a file with ~70,000 data points, each of which has 21 features. Each feature is uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. All you have to do is make a binary classification of 0 or 1 (or, more accurately, the probability that the data point is in class 0 or 1). They don't tell you what the 21 features represent. As far as you know, these predictions could be used to make currency trades, or stock predictions, or real estate purchase, or something more exotic. You really have no idea. And since you don't know what these data points represent you can't use any insider knowledge about anything to help you.
- acchow 10y agoThe grandparent's point wasn't that the people doing the analysis are injecting insider information....it's that the data dump you've been presented could be some fancy encoding of insider information.
- usefulcat 10y agoHow would that work? If Numerai already has insider information, why not just use it directly? Why go to the bother (and risk) of anonymizing and distributing it?
- sanswork 10y agoPlausible deniability.
- mrich 10y agoThere would be none if they were aware the information they hand out contains insider info.
- ForHackernews 10y agoHow would you prove it? It's just an anonymous list of features to train a model.
- module0000 10y ago> Ok, so how is this anything but an anonymous proxy to arbitrage insider information? I think an anonymous means to act-on/acquire insider information is in the "omg I want this" category. Kudos to Numerai.