Evaluating Neural Network Predictors by Bootstrapping

We present a new method, inspired by the bootstrap, whose goal it is to determine the quality and reliability of a neural network predictor. Our method leads to more robust forecasting along with a large amount of statistical information on forecast performance that we exploit. We exhibit the method in the context of multi-variate time series prediction on financial data from the New York Stock Exchange. It turns out that the variation due to different resamplings (i.e., splits between training, cross-validation, and test sets) is significantly larger than the variation due to different network conditions (such as architecture and initial weights). Furthermore, this method allows us to forecast a probability distribution, as opposed to the traditional case of just a single value at each time step. We demonstrate this on a strictly held-out test set that includes the 1987 stock market crash. We also compare the performance of the class of neural networks to identically bootstrapped linear models.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)