Mathematical Finance & Financial Data Science Seminars : An Introduction to causal AI for Institutional Investment Managers

Speaker: Ben Steiner

Location: On-Line

Date: Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Causal AI is a new category of intelligent machines designed to reason about the world like humans (according to AI visionaries):

- “To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect.” Judea Pearl, Turing Award winner 2011, Author ‘Book of Why?’, 2018

- “Causality is very important for the next steps of progress of machine learning.” Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award winner 2018, considered one of ‘the godfathers of Deep Learning’

- Nobel prize recently awarded for “analysis of causal relationships” The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded to Professors Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens in November 2021

AGENDA

- What we mean by Causal AI

- Foundational concepts in Causal AI

- Current state & existing approaches to Causal AI modeling

- Examples from asset management that can be viewed differently through a causal lens:

    - Human guided macro research in the investment process

    - portfolio optimisation,

    - discovery of orthogonal model factors,  &

    - evaluation of models via causal risk assessment