Deep Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Stopping with Application in Financial Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Optimal stopping is the problem of deciding the right time at which to take a particular action in a stochastic system, in order to maximize an expected reward. It has many applications in areas such as finance, healthcare, and statistics. In this paper, we employ deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) to learn optimal stopping policies in two financial engineering applications: namely option pricing, and optimal option exercise. We present for the first time a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the quality of optimal stopping policies identified by three state of the art deep RL algorithms: double deep Q-learning (DDQN), categorical distributional RL (C51), and Implicit Quantile Networks (IQN). In the case of option pricing, our findings indicate that in a theoretical Black-Schole environment, IQN successfully identifies nearly optimal prices. On the other hand, it is slightly outperformed by C51 when confronted to real stock data movements in a put option exercise problem that involves assets from the S&P500 index. More importantly, the C51 algorithm is able to identify an optimal stopping policy that achieves 8% more out-of-sample returns than the best of four natural benchmark policies. We conclude with a discussion of our findings which should pave the way for relevant future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".