QU Fall School | Synthetic Data Generation in Finance

In this master class, Stefan shows how to create synthetic time-series data using generative adversarial networks (GAN). GANs train a generator and a discriminator network in a competitive setting so that the generator learns to produce samples that the discriminator cannot distinguish from a given class of training data. The goal is to yield a generative model capable of producing synthetic samples representative of this class. While most popular with image data, GANs have also been used to generate synthetic time-series data in the medical domain. Subsequent experiments with financial data explored whether GANs can produce alternative price trajectories useful for ML training or strategy backtests.