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Link to original content: https://doi.org/10.1145/3383455.3422529
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Quantifying ESG alpha using scholar big data: an automated machine learning approach

Published: 07 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

ESG (Environmental, social and governance) alpha strategy that makes sustainable investment has gained popularity among investors. The ESG fields of study in scholar big data is a valuable alternative data that reflects a company's long-term ESG commitment. However, it is considered a difficulty to quantitatively measure a company's ESG premium and its impact to the company's stock price using scholar big data. In this paper, we utilize ESG scholar data as alternative data to develop an automatic trading strategy and propose a practical machine learning approach to quantify the ESG premium of a company and capture the ESG alpha. First, we construct our ESG investment universe and apply feature engineering on the companies' ESG scholar data from the Microsoft Academic Graph database. Then, we train six complementary machine learning models using a combination of financial indicators and ESG scholar data features and employ an ensemble method to predict stock prices and automatically set up portfolio allocation. Finally, we manage our portfolio, trade and rebalance the portfolio allocation monthly using predicted stock prices. We backtest our ESG alpha strategy and compare its performance with benchmarks. The proposed ESG alpha strategy achieves a cumulative return of 2,154.4% during the backtesting period of ten years, which significantly outperforms the NASDAQ-100 index's 397.4% and S&P 500's 226.9%. The traditional financial indicators results in only 1,443.7%, thus our scholar data-based ESG alpha strategy is better at capturing ESG premium than traditional financial indicators.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICAIF '20: Proceedings of the First ACM International Conference on AI in Finance
October 2020
422 pages
ISBN:9781450375849
DOI:10.1145/3383455
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 October 2021

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Author Tags

  1. AI in finance
  2. ESG alpha
  3. alternative data
  4. quantitative investment
  5. scholar data

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ICAIF '20
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ICAIF '20: ACM International Conference on AI in Finance
October 15 - 16, 2020
New York, New York

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  • (2024)Implementation of deep learning models in predicting ESG index volatilityFinancial Innovation10.1186/s40854-023-00604-010:1Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Where and how machine learning plays a role in climate finance researchJournal of Sustainable Finance & Investment10.1080/20430795.2024.2370325(1-42)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
  • (2024)A novel Deep Reinforcement Learning based automated stock trading system using cascaded LSTM networksExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2023.122801242(122801)Online publication date: May-2024
  • (2024)Dynamic datasets and market environments for financial reinforcement learningMachine Language10.1007/s10994-023-06511-w113:5(2795-2839)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and artificial intelligence in finance: State-of-the-art and research takeawaysArtificial Intelligence Review10.1007/s10462-024-10708-357:4Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Deep Reinforcement Learning for Automated of Asian Stocks TradingApplications of Optimal Transport to Economics and Related Topics10.1007/978-3-031-67770-0_37(539-554)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2024
  • (2023)ESG information extraction with cross-sectoral and multi-source adaptation based on domain-tuned language modelsExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2023.119726221:COnline publication date: 1-Jul-2023
  • (2022)FinRL-metaProceedings of the 36th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems10.5555/3600270.3600404(1835-1849)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Proposing an Integrated Approach to Analyzing ESG Data via Machine Learning and Deep Learning AlgorithmsSustainability10.3390/su1414874514:14(8745)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022

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