their dynamic and noisy nature. The FTSE 100 index trades futures contracts were
utilized as a case study. A future contract is a contract between two parties and its
cash settlement is determined by calculating the difference between the traded price
and the closing price of the index on the expiration day of the contract. Most tradi-
tional methods and more complex machine learning ones have recently failed to cap-
ture the complexity and the nonlinearities that exist in financial time series during the
latest crisis period. Certain disadvantages have been identified on traditional model-
ling and trading methods including the difficulties in tuning the parameters of the
algorithm, the disability of linear methods to provide good prediction results, the
overfitting problem and the fact that modelling and trading are most of the times con-
sidered as different problems. Lately, several machine learning methods have been
proposed to solve these problems [1]. Despite the encouraging results of new hybrid
methodologies their performance could be further enhanced.
Considering modelling and trading of the FTSE100 index, many researchers have
been occupied with this problem. These methods are either based on simple tradition-
al methods such as ARMA [2], or on machine learning techniques. The machine
learning applications range from simple neural network techniques, such as Higher
Order Neural Networks (HONN) [3] to more elaborate techniques such as the hybrid
method combining Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm with Recurrent Neural Networks
[4] and the hybrid methodologies which combine Genetic Algorithms with Support
Vector Machines (SVM) [5].
Despite the promising methods of the aforementioned techniques most of them
deal with the FTSE100 index as being independent and cut off from the global stock
market. However, the reality is very different. As expected several articles indicated
dependencies between the FTSE100 index and several other financial indices [6, 7]
and these dependencies have not yet been studied thoroughly. Thus, in order to
achieve optimal prediction and trading results using the FTSE100 index, several in-
puts from other financial indices should be utilized alongside with the traditional au-
toregressive and technical indicator inputs. The size of the universe of financial indi-
ces which could possibly be dependent with FTSE100 is so high that makes this prob-
lem relevant to the “big data” [8] topic which has gained the attention of the scientific
community lately.
In the present paper, we have created an integrated dataset for modelling and daily
trading with the FTSE100 index. This dataset, includes inputs and technical indicators
from a variety of financial time-series including VIX, S&P500, DAXX, Euro Stoxx
50, and EURGBP exchange rate. The major problems for utilizing such integrated
datasets for modelling and trading are: a) the difficulty to solve effectively the dimen-
sionality reduction problem and b) the difficulty to achieve interpretability for extract-
ing useful knowledge about the uncovered dependencies.
In the present study, we propose the ESVM Fuzzy Inference Trader to solve both
these problems. This method is based on a Support Vector Machine methodology to
achieve high performance predictions and it proposes an advanced technique to ex-
tract a meaningful compact set of fuzzy prediction rules. Moreover, a simple genetic
algorithm finds the optimal feature subsets which should be used as inputs and opti-
mizes the parameters of the overall modelling procedure. The final extracted inter-