Anomaly Detection for Portfolio Risk Management : An evaluation of econometric and machine learning based approaches to detecting anomalous behaviour in portfolio risk measures

Abstract: Financial institutions manage numerous portfolios whose risk must be managed continuously, and the large amounts of data that has to be processed renders this a considerable effort. As such, a system that autonomously detects anomalies in the risk measures of financial portfolios, would be of great value. To this end, the two econometric models ARMA-GARCH and EWMA, and the two machine learning based algorithms LSTM and HTM, were evaluated for the task of performing unsupervised anomaly detection on the streaming time series of portfolio risk measures. Three datasets of returns and Value-at-Risk series were synthesized and one dataset of real-world Value-at-Risk series had labels handcrafted for the experiments in this thesis. The results revealed that the LSTM has great potential in this domain, due to an ability to adapt to different types of time series and for being effective at finding a wide range of anomalies. However, the EWMA had the benefit of being faster and more interpretable, but lacked the ability to capture anomalous trends. The ARMA-GARCH was found to have difficulties in finding a good fit to the time series of risk measures, resulting in poor performance, and the HTM was outperformed by the other algorithms in every regard, due to an inability to learn the autoregressive behaviour of the time series.