Relationship of daily round correlations to final round correlations

[jrai]

@profricecake

This appears to counter your claim that the change between the last two daily score corr values is due solely to daily market movement, unless magically the market moves less on the final days of a Numerai tournament than it does on the starting days. Which of course it doesn’t.

Since we are predicting what the market will look like only on day 20, it could stand to reason that, as the round progresses, each day becomes more similar to day 20. I’d expect the difference between day 1 to day 2 to have a lot of noise because they are both the least like day 20 and maybe in different ways. The difference between day 18 and day 19 should have less noise because they are both most like day 20. “There are many ways to be different, but only one way to be the same” might apply? All of this only figures “on average and over time” as of course there could be large shocks later on in rounds on some occasions.

@profricecake

What remains clear is that the early daily scores are not very predictive of the final score. Just look at @jrai’s original plot. So why are they presented to us at all? What kind of value are we supposed to get from them if they have no bearing on the final score as some have claimed, and (as of yet) no unambiguous meaning?

If we didn’t have daily scores, how would we become addicted to refreshing the leaderboard and profile pages? It’s just gamification. Cooler heads should pay little attention to it in the long run, except if we discover some information can be gleaned from a model’s intraround volatility: Sharpe and Sortino ratios on live performance of your models (@degerhan’s post still hasn’t gotten enough attention).