Complete Neighbourhood Search Heuristic Algorithm for Portfolio Optimization

Abstract

In portfolio optimization, the fundamental goal of an investor is to optimally allocate investments between different assets. Mean-variance optimization methods make unrealistic assumptions to solve the problem of optimal allocation. On the other hand, when realistic constraints like holding size and cardinality are introduced it leads to optimal asset allocation which differ from the mean variance optimization. The resulting optimization problem become quite complex as it exhibits multiple local extrema and discontinuities. Heuristic algorithms work well for the complex problem. Therefore, a heuristic algorithm is developed which is based on hill climbing complete (HC-C). It is utilized to solve the extended portfolio optimization problem. In order to validate its performance, the proposed HC-C is tested with standard portfolio optimization problem. Experimental results are benchmarked with the quadratic programming method and threshold accepting (TA) algorithm.

Key words: Optimization, Portfolio, Heuristics, Hill Climbing, Algorithm, Threshold Accepting.