The journal IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation is preparing a

SPECIAL ISSUE ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION FOR FINANCE, ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT SCIENCE

Submission Deadline: 15th Nov. 2012

I. AIM AND SCOPE

Real-world problems related to finance, economics and management sciences involve complexity, noisy environments, uncertainty and vagueness, which make them difficult to be handled by the conventional analytical and numerical paradigms. Over the last two decades, it has been witnessed that these problems can be much easier to solve or address with the use of the new computational paradigms, and evolutionary computation is one of the most striking examples. Not only does it help researchers push forward their research frontiers, but, to some extent, also reshape their research subjects with new thinking and new focuses on what the problem really is.

The most significant change happens in the way that we define and characterize the problems. From maximum likelihood estimation, portfolio optimization, option pricing, algorithmic trading and risk management, we no longer sidestep the real issue with the convenient assumptions, such as smoothness, differentiability, and Gaussian. Legal and institutional arrangements and human behavioral traits normally place the issues above in a very rugged nasty environment. Evolutionary computation has helped the researchers by shedding light on this “dark” environment and finding out the solution. Within this advancement, risk characterized by the high-order moments does not have to be assumed away when it is not quadratic and when Taylor expansion can help little. Also, evolutionary computation is readily adaptable or scalable to various new challenges introduced by the launching of new institutional and regulatory framework, exemplified as the extension of Basel II to Basel III.

The other significant change is more fundamental, covering the philosophical, ontological, epistemological aspects of economics: what economics really is, and how it should be studied. Alfred Marshall once said that economics like biology; its inner nature and outer constituents and forms are constantly changing. However, this biological connection was not substantially made until the milestone work done by Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Lawrence Fogel, John Holland and many others, which helped form a new paradigm for economics, known as agent-based computational economics, in which economics is modeled as an evolving large population of interacting heterogeneous agents. Using evolutionary computation, economists develop various autonomous agents who have the capabilities to adapt, to learn, to finding chances and to strategically interact with others and the surroundings. This paradigm is also taken as an alternative by economists when they reflect upon the failure of mainstream macroeconomic models in forecasting and dealing with the recent financial crisis. Evolutionary computation is now actively involved in various agent-based financial markets and macroeconomic models, in addition to electricity markets, housing markets, monopolistic competition, research and development evaluation, and public resource allocation. In other words, it has become the backbone technology underling the formation of modern public policies.

II. TOPICS

The aim of the special issue is bringing together the latest advances from both the theoretical and the application side at the intersection of evolutionary computation and finance, economics and management sciences. Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality original manuscripts in any topics that make significant contributions to applications of EC to economics, finance and management science, in one or more of the following three ways: (1) introducing a new or modified version of EC, a new representation, or a groundbreaking hybridizations, which can better address the existing problems, (2) conducting a thorough and extensive examination of the existing applications of EC, including robustness check, benchmarking and statistic evaluations, (3) identifying a new application domain, which EC has the potential to make a breakthrough.


III. IMPORTANT DATES

15 Nov. 2012: Submission deadline:
15 Feb. 2013: Notice of the first round review
1 Apr 2013: Revision due
15 May 2013: Final notice of acceptance / reject
30 June 2013: Final manuscript due:

IV. SUBMISSION

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the instructions of the “Information for Authors” section of the journal, available at http://ieee-cis.org/pubs/tec/authors/. Submissions should be done through the IEEE TEC journal website: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tevc-ieee and clearly indicate “Special Issue on EC in Finance, Economics and Management Sciences” in the comments to the Editor-in-Chief. Submitted papers will be reviewed by at least three reviewers. The submission of a manuscript implies that it is the authors’ original unpublished work and is not being submitted for possible publication elsewhere.

V. GUEST EDITORS

Prof. Shu-Heng Chen, AI-ECON Research Center, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
chen.shuheng@gmail.com

Prof. Dirk Van den Poel, Department of Marketing, Ghent University, Belgium
dirk.vandenpoel@ugent.be

Prof. David Quintana, Department of Computer Science, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain
dquintan@inf.uc3m.es

Prof. Edward P. Tsang, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK
edward@essex.ac.uk