BMGT 499B - Spring 2014

Louiqa Raschid

Smith School of Business and UMIACS

Data Science for Finance

Tuesday April 1 to April 29 7:00 to 9:40 p.m. VMH 4335


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Class description

As the world of finance attempts to understand what brought our country’s economy to the brink in 2008, and as federal regulators seek out new strategies to avoid or manage future crises, it is evident that “systemic analysis” methodologies are required to model “systemic events”. The financial world is a closely interlinked Web of financial entities and networks, supply chains and financial ecosystems, where multiple financial entities may be counterparties to a complex financial contract. Financial analysts, regulators and academic researchers recognize that they must address the unprecedented and unfamiliar challenges of monitoring, integrating, and analyzing data at scale.

The computing community has responded with proof of concept prototype solutions. However, for this effort to be successful over the next decade a robust and extensive community financial data science infrastructure is required on which new ideas and solutions can be developed and evaluated. The theory and practice of good financial data management is a critical issue affecting risk assessment, with potentially significant consequences and systemic implications.

Financial risk and information managers are gradually recognizing the concepts of metadata management, precise data definitions based on ontologies, and semantic models and knowledge representation as essential strategic objectives. These same concerns apply with equal urgency to the financial regulators tasked with understanding individual firms and the overall system. A sound data infrastructure and open standards are necessary, both for effective regulation and for coordinating industry efforts.

A compelling technical outcome is that there will be increasing synergy from applying computational technology, BIGDATA and Linked Data, social networks and social media, to address difficult modeling and monitoring problems in financial ecosystems. This may result in improved tools for regulators to monitor financial systems as well as fundamentally new designs of market mechanisms, new ways to reach consumers, new ways to exploit the wisdom of the crowds to review and rate financial products, to make recommendations, etc.

Who should take this class? The ideal student will have the following characteristics:

Please contact me by email louiqa@umiacs.umd.edu before you enroll.

Topics

Logistics:

Course grades will be determined using the following elements: