EDDIE is a Genetic Programming (GP) tool, which is used to tackle problems in the field of financial forecasting. The novelty of EDDIE is in its grammar, which allows the GP to look in the space of technical analysis indicators, instead of using prespecified ones, as it normally happens in the literature. The advantage of this is that EDDIE is not constrained to use prespecified indicators; instead, thanks to its grammar, it can choose any indicators within a pre-defined range, leading to new solutions that might have never been discovered before. However, a disadvantage of the above approach is that the algorithm's search space is dramatically larger, and as a result good solutions can sometimes be missed due to ineffective search. This paper presents an attempt to deal with this issue by applying to the GP three different meta-heuristics, namely Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, and Guided Local Search. Results show that the algorithm's performance significantly improves, thus making the combination of Genetic Programming and meta-heuristics an effective financial forecasting approach.

Abstract-Guided Local Search is a powerful meta-heuristic algorithm that has been applied to a successful Genetic Programming Financial Forecasting tool called EDDIE. Although previous research has shown that it has significantly improved the performance of EDDIE, it also increased its computational cost to a high extent. This paper presents an attempt to deal with this issue by combining Guided Local Search with Fast Local Search, an algorithm that has shown in the past to be able to significantly reduce the computational cost of Guided Local Search. Results show that EDDIE's computational cost has been reduced by an impressive 75%, while at the same time there is no cost to the predictive performance of the algorithm.

Abstract-Hyper-heuristics have successfully been applied to a vast number of search and optimization problems. One of the novelties of hyper-heuristics is the fact that they manage and automate the meta-heuristic's selection process. In this paper, we implemented and analyzed a hyper-heuristic framework on three meta-heuristics namely Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, and Guided Local Search, which had successfully been applied in the past to a Financial Forecasting algorithm called EDDIE. EDDIE uses Genetic Programming to extract and learn from historical data in order to predict future financial market movements. Results show that the algorithm's effectiveness has improved, thus making the combination of meta-heuristics under a hyper-heuristic framework an effective Financial Forecasting approach.