Evidence and evaluation
Systematic reviews of AI in finance that measure how the field tests its claims.
Project: evidence review →AI4Finance Lab studies how AI systems use financial evidence, how they should be designed, and how their results should be evaluated so that they hold up outside the lab.
Our mission is to build AI for finance whose claims survive realistic conditions, and to develop evaluation standards the field can adopt.
Forecasting edges in finance have a long history of disappearing once costs, data snooping and look-ahead bias are accounted for. We treat that as our starting point, and we value a well-tested negative result as much as a positive one.
Hypotheses and tests are fixed before results are seen.
Walk-forward testing, with no information from the future.
Economic results reported across realistic cost assumptions.
We say what our data can and cannot detect.
Each programme asks its own question and runs its own projects. Together they share one standard of evidence.
Systematic reviews of AI in finance that measure how the field tests its claims.
Project: evidence review →Specialist agents for fundamental, technical and sentiment evidence, and a coordinator that must beat a simple average net of costs.
Project page coming soonWhat language models can reliably extract from company reports, filings and other financial text.
Project page coming soonA shared testing harness and reporting checklist that other researchers can use for AI forecasting claims.
Project page coming soonA systematic review of 775 journal studies, 2015 to 2026. Its finding: the field's methods are advancing faster than its reporting of how they are evaluated.
journal studies reviewed
do not state how models were evaluated
meet a full evaluation standard
walk-forward reporting rises sharply
[Authors]. [Journal], [volume], [pages].
Kalantarinejad, R. and Amel-Zadeh, A. Working paper.
AI4Finance Lab white paper.
Amir is Associate Professor of Accounting at Saïd Business School and a Research Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. His research covers financial and non-financial disclosure, accounting and capital regulation in banking, sustainable investment, and the use of natural language processing and machine learning on financial disclosures. He holds a PhD and MPhil in Finance from the University of Cambridge, where he was a University Lecturer at Judge Business School, and worked at Lehman Brothers before entering academia. He is a board member of the UK Endorsement Board.
Reza is a Research Assistant at Saïd Business School, researching the role of AI in innovation and agentic systems. At the lab he builds the agents, the evaluation harness and the systematic reviews. He holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, with a computational thesis on nano-biosensor design, and has more than 30 publications, three books and six patents. He co-developed the Innovation Readiness Level (IRL) model and holds a Scale AI STEM Fellowship.
Join us. We welcome visiting researchers, students and collaborators.
Get in touchAn introduction to the lab's mission, research programmes and team.
Our review of 775 studies on AI-based equity prediction is in preparation for journal submission.
We welcome researchers, practitioners and data partners interested in rigorous evaluation of AI in finance.