Topic: Increase Generator Success Rate
Popov, I'm thinking of a way to "speed" up FSB Pro/EA Studio Generator's time to search for profitable EA and also thereby improve the results i.e, with better EA quality
I noticed that the Generator sometime (in fact often) generate EA that has "wrong" rules such as for Long position, it has rules such as change direction down, falling, cross downward, all these are "wrong" because there rules are going against the trend for a Buy/Long position and they don't stay profitable in long run.
So I'm suggesting that you cut down these options in the process of generating. In the indicators rules there are Rising, Falling, higher than the line, lower than the line, cross the line upward, cross the line downward, etc
1. Use only Buying/Long Rules for Opening Conditions.
If you look at all these options, half of these options are for Buy/Long positions and the other half is for Selling/Short positions. So in your generator, if you were to delete half of the "wrong" options available (for Opening positions), you would cut down the number of possible search by half (which by the way, these options would have produce unreliable results).
2. Use Buying/Long Trend Parameters for Opening Conditions.
Second method is to impose a certain "rule" in the choice of parameters. In another words the faster parameters must be smaller than the slower parameters for Buy/long positions (I know that in some cases, rarely, this rule may not apply but these case are minority).
So your Generator will have 2 "Filters" rules to provide some "guidance" or "structure" on how the Generator search for EA. 1st filter is use only Buying Rules for Open positons (such as Rising, Higher than, Direction change upward, cross over etc) and 2nd filter is to use only Buying Parameters (such as faster parameter must be smaller than Slower parameters, these apply only to indicators that uses only 1 type of measurement such as MA, but not "cross indicators or dual indicators, that uses 2 different measurements such as RSI MA Osci which uses MA and RSI and ROC MA Osci which uses Rate of Change and MA etc). If anyone of you have any other particular indicators that you don't want this 2nd rule to apply to the Generator, do post your commends here.
I believe that if you apply such Basic Trading Rules to the Generator, it will at least be producing "theoretically" sound EA that has better reliability and predictability value and hence give your users higher success rate. And you would have cut down the time needed to generate EA because you reduce the number of iteration/probabilities by half or more.
Lastly, one of the reasons why I don't use Generator in both FSB Pro or EA Studio is, I often get "theoretically unsound" EA being churned out by Generator and after looking at the EA's rule structure, I discard them and don't run use the Generator at all.
I prefer to use the Optimiser instead because I will input some "Basic Structure" in my opening/closing conditions and then let the Optimiser "fine tune" the EA and recently I've been getting fantastic results. These "Basic Structure" is part of my workflow (which of cos contain more than these 2 basic rules) whereby there are some "Basic Trading rules" that are necessary for a EA to be profitable. And of cos part of basic rules (are common sense) is to use the 2 methods I've suggested in the post (which any novice traders would take this knowledge for granted) and ironically, Generator is not using these basic rule in it's algorithm to search for reliable and repeatable patterns that are necessary for EA to stay profitable and robust.
Kindly consider these suggestions so that FSB users can enjoy greater success...especially for those taking the data mining path. It cuts down the time needed to generate EA and improve the search quality.
PS: For those who don't want to wait till these rules are implemented into the Generator's algorithm, you can use the Optimiser like the Generator. The only difference is to input your own trading rules (if you don't know any trading rules to use, go to the website http://forex-strategies-revealed.com and read up some of the strategies and input them yourself in FSB. And then let the Optimiser fine tune for you. If you aren't sure of the parameters to use, use Optimiser +/- !0% or more but if you are more or less sure of the rules, optimise only 5%