Search

The Huff model is designed to estimate the probability of shopping centre patronage based on a shopping centre's attractiveness and the cost of a customer's travel. In this paper, we attempt to discover some general shopping trends by calibrating the Huff model in Shenzhen, China, and New York, USA, using taxi trajectory GPS data and sharing bikes GPS data. Geographical and Temporal Weighted Regression (GTWR) is used to fit the model, and calibration results are compared with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, Geographical Weighted Regression (GWR), and Temporal Weighted Regression (TWR). Results show that GTWR gives the highest performance due to significant geographical and temporal variation in the Huff model parameters of attractiveness and travel cost. To explain the geographical variation, we use residential sales' and rental prices in Shenzhen and New York as a proxy for customers' wealth in each region. Pearson product-moment correlation results show a medium relationship between localised sales' and rental prices and the Huff model parameter of attractiveness: that is, customer wealth explains geographic sensitivity to shopping area attractiveness. To explain temporal variation, we use census data in both Shenzhen and New York to provide job profile distributions for each region as a proxy to estimate customers' spare leisure time. Regression results demonstrate that there is a significant linear relationship between the length of spare time and the parameter of shopping area attractiveness. In particular, we demonstrate that wealthy customers with less spare time are more sensitive to a shopping centre's attractiveness. We also discover customers' sensitivities to travel distance are related to their travel mode. In particular, people riding bikes to shopping areas care much more about trip distance compared with people who take taxi. Finally, results show a divergence in behaviours between customers in New York and Shenzhen at weekends. While customers in New York prefer to shop more locally at weekends, customers in Shenzhen care less about trip distance. We provide the GTWR calibration of the Huff model as our theoretical contribution. GTWR extends the Huff model to two dimensions (time and space), so as to analyse the differences of residents' travel behaviours in different time and locations. We also provide the discoveries of factors affecting urban travel behaviours (wealth and employment) as practical contributions that may help optimise urban transportation design. In particular, the sensitivity of residents to the attraction of shopping areas has a significant positive linear relationship with the housing price and a significant negative linear relationship with the residents' length of spare time.

Machine learning (ML) project deployments often have long lead times and may face delays or failures due to lack of data, poor data quality, and data drift. To address these problems, we introduce AgileML, a novel machine learning product development lifecycle where the end consumer and development team work collaboratively through an iterative process of development. We use AgileML to develop a commercial spend classification service and demonstrate that the earliest alpha deployment can offer users significant commercial value. User-testing with a professional spend analyst demonstrates that the system can lead to a five-fold increase in classification speed.

Dark pools are financial trading venues where orders are entered and matched in secret so that no order information is leaked. By preventing information leakage, dark pools offer the opportunity for large volume block traders to avoid the costly effects of market impact. However, dark pool operators have been known to abuse their privileged access to order information. To address this issue, we introduce a provably secure multi-party computation mechanism that prevents an operator from accessing and misusing order information. Specifically, we implement a secure emulation of Turquoise Plato Uncross, Europe's largest dark pool trading mechanism, and demonstrate that it can handle real world trading throughput, with guaranteed information integrity. keywords: dark pool, information leakage, information misuse, multi-party computation, secure trading, trust, turquoise plato uncross ispartof: Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management vol:28 issue:4 pages:239-267 ispartof: location:England status: published

We use blockchain technology to tackle the problem of securing periodic double auctions for financial ‘dark pool’ trading, such that the privacy of pre-trade order information is preserved and the behaviour of the auction operator can be verified. A smart contract is used as a public audit trail without revealing the order intention of traders. Auction matching is performed off-chain, allowing alternative auction mechanisms to be used without altering the smart contract code. A full system implementation is deployed on the Harmony blockchain, and comparative evaluation of the protocol demonstrates some clear advantages over the closest published alternative.

We consider issues of time in automated trading strategies in simulated financial markets containing a single exchange with public limit order book and continuous double auction matching. In particular, we explore two effects: (i) reaction speed - the time taken for trading strategies to calculate a response to market events; and (ii) trading urgency - the sensitivity of trading strategies to approaching deadlines. Much of the literature on trading agents focuses on optimising pricing strategies only and ignores the effects of time, while real-world markets continue to experience a race to zero latency, as automated trading systems compete to quickly access information and act in the market ahead of others. We demonstrate that modelling reaction speed can significantly alter previously published results, with simple strategies such as SHVR outperforming more complex adaptive algorithms such as AA. We also show that adding a pace parameter to ZIP traders (ZIP-Pace, or ZIPP) can create a sense of urgency that significantly improves profitability.