abstract = "Financial investment decision making is extremely
difficult due to the complexity of the domain. Many
factors could influence the change of share prices. FGP
(Financial Genetic Programming) is a genetic
programming based forecasting system, which is designed
to help users evaluate the impact of factors and
explore their interactions in relation to future
prices. Users channel into FGP factors which they
believe are relevant to the prediction. Examples of
such factors may include fundamental factors such as
'price-earning ratio', 'inflation rate' and/or
technical factors such as '5-days moving average',
'63-days trading range breakout', etc. FGP uses the
power of genetic generated decision trees through
technical rules with self-adjusted thresholds. In
earlier papers, we have reported how FGP used
well-known technical analysis rules to make investment
decisions (E.P.K. Tsang et al., 1998; J. Li and E.P.K.
Tsang, 1999). The paper tests the versatility of FGP by
testing it on shorter term investment decisions. To
evaluate FGP more thoroughly, we also compare it with
C4.5, a well known machine learning classifier system.
We used six and a half years' daily closing price of
the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) index for
training and over three and half years' data for
testing, and obtained favourable results for FGP",
notes = "CEC-99 - A joint meeting of the IEEE, Evolutionary
Programming Society, Galesia, and the IEE.