Feature selection for support vector machines in financial time series forecasting

Abstract

This paper deals with the application of saliency analysis to Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for feature selection. The importance of feature is ranked by evaluating the sensitivity of the network output to the feature input in terms of the partial derivative. A systematic approach to remove irrelevant features based on the sensitivity is developed. Five futures contracts are examined in the experiment. Based on the simulation results, it is shown that that saliency analysis is effective in SVMs for identifying important features.