Just downloaded the demo. Anyone care to offer any comments, shortcuts, advice, etc? You know, on how I might make sense of this thing?
Pretty steep learning curve. I've used nets for several years but for different applications. I've built and trained models for trading with nerosolutions but prefer simple indicators for the real world nuts and bolts of making the house payment.
They must have some demo models - have a good look at these. - Keep number of inputs small - PCA can help here (if you don't know what PCA is or the product does not offer it don't worry about it then). - Preprocessing of inputs is extremely important - again PCA applies here - plus (filtering, detrending, i.e. you will hardly see "Close" as an input, but you will see "Change in Close" or "Percent Change in Close"). And then, you have the choice of Network, number of layers, etc, etc. Caution, NNs are amazing curve-fitters.
In the past when I was playing around with it I noticed that their "Solution Library" often changed. These are models that they developed as examples. I figured if the guys who created the software couldn't come up with a good example of models that work, what chance did I have? http://www.tradingsolutions.com/downloads/solution.html http://www.tradingsolutions.com/products/sample.html What I found was that the examples backtested well but quickly fell out of favor and were replaced at their site so that you could never really watch the results being forward tested. When I emailed them about this (why previous models disappeared from their site rather than showing their results long-term) their reply was fairly vague about models only working so long and needing to be re-optimized. Maybe someone should email them and ask them to have a company rep post in this thread to answer questions about their software.