A hybrid decision support system for adaptive trading strategies: Combining a rule-based expert system with a deep reinforcement learning strategy

Stock trading strategies pose challenging applications of machine learning for significant commercial yields in the finance industry, drawing the attention of both economists and computer scientists. Until now, many researchers have proposed various methods to implement intelligent trading strategy systems that can support decisions regarding stock trading. Some studies have shown that the problem of trading strategies can be successfully addressed by applying hybrid approaches. Motivated by this, we propose a hybrid decision support system for adaptive trading strategies that combines a rule-based system with deep reinforcement learning to self-improve by learning with human expertise. This study overcomes the limitations of previous hybrid models that mainly have focused on optimizing trading decisions and improving forecasting accuracy. The proposed hybrid model combines decision-making information from a rule-based model to enable the agent of reinforcement learning to capture more trading opportunities. In addition, the investor's available balance states facilitate adaptive learning by interacting with the environment. Moreover, the proposed trading mechanism adjusts the volume size using the policy gradient algorithm's action probabilities, resulting in improved risk-adjusted returns. The proposed hybrid model has the potential to be a reliable trading system in real-world applications through its ability to adapt to different market scenarios, withstand stressful market conditions, reduce transaction costs, scale to various index funds, and extend the proposed hybrid structure. This study highlights the applicability of more advanced machine learning in financial areas, and we also suggest expanding this approach to adaptive decision-making systems in other fields.