A Hybrid Approach on Conditional GAN for Portfolio Analysis

Abstract: Over the decades, the Markowitz framework has been used extensively in portfolio analysis though it puts too much emphasis on the analysis of the market uncertainty rather than on the trend prediction. While generative adversarial network (GAN), conditional GAN (CGAN), and autoencoding CGAN (ACGAN) have been explored to generate financial time series and extract features that can help portfolio analysis. The limitation of the CGAN or ACGAN framework stands in putting too much emphasis on generating series and finding the internal trends of the series rather than predicting the future trends. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid approach on conditional GAN based on deep generative models that learns the internal trend of historical data while modeling market uncertainty and future trends. We evaluate the model on several real-world datasets from both the US and Europe markets, and show that the proposed HybridCGAN and HybridACGAN models lead to better portfolio allocation compared to the existing Markowitz, CGAN, and ACGAN approaches.