MEASURED COST OF THE GA, which is what retired it. Per generation:
rung 0: 8 cand x 3 seeds x 3 eras = 72 eras
rung 1: 4 cand x 3 seeds x 8 eras = 96
rung 2: 2 cand x 3 seeds x 20 eras = 120
= 288 eras/generation x 4 generations = 1152 eras BEFORE the winner's
real training began. Against the observed era times on SP500 H1:
PAI 29.1 s/era -> 9.3 h (matches the observed 00:37 -> 09:22)
CONV 41.3 s/era -> 13.2 h
LSTM 150.4 s/era -> 48.1 h
HYBRID 154.6 s/era -> 49.5 h
Two days to tune is not a first-run experience, and it is the phase in
which the panel goes quiet, which is what made it look like a hang.
It also bought nothing. The space is 90 points (10 MA periods x 9 MA
types), so 1152 evaluations revisited each point ~13 times; and rungs of
3 and 8 eras cannot separate two MA periods at all. The 2026-08-01 run
proves it: every finalist scored 25.0-25.9% balanced accuracy - below the
33.3% one-class floor, i.e. indistinguishable noise - and the search then
"deployed the winner" of that.
THE ERROR WAS THE SCORING FUNCTION, not its constants. Using a full
training run to choose a feature's period is a wrapper method paying
wrapper prices for a decision that does not need one. The reference book
does not do this: ch. 3.3 selects inputs by measuring each candidate
indicator's CORRELATION with the target and dropping the ones with none,
with no network involved.
So: rank candidates by the MUTUAL INFORMATION between the resulting
feature vector and the triple-barrier label. MI rather than correlation
because the label is 3-class categorical and the features are not
monotonically related to it. Equal-FREQUENCY binning (rank-based),
because these features are ATR-normalised and heavy-tailed - fixed-width
bins put nearly everything in one bucket and report ~0 information for a
genuinely useful feature.
Scoring is arithmetic over the feature cache, so it costs seconds and its
cost is independent of topology: LSTM now tunes as fast as the MLP.
Coordinate sweep, not product sweep - cost is the SUM of per-parameter
candidate counts, so enabling every indicator stays affordable - with a
second pass that breaks early once nothing moves.
Sampling is IS-ONLY. Letting the OOS window influence which indicator
settings ship would mean the holdout had been used for selection and had
stopped being a holdout.
HONEST LIMIT, recorded because it is the price: MI is marginal, so a
parameter that only pays off in combination with another can be missed
(Guyon & Elisseeff 2003, filter vs wrapper). Given the wrapper it
replaces was ranking pure noise at 48 h a run, this is strictly better.
Deleted with it: GaRungEras/GaExtract/GaStore/GaMutate/GaRandomCandidate/
GaBlockCrossover/GaSortAliveByScoreDesc/GaBreedNextGeneration, 14 m_ga*
members, the GA_*/TUNE_POP_* constants, and ComputeTuneTrialBudget.
AND m_evalMode/m_evalEraBudget, because nothing set them any more - 28
read sites all permanently inert. That is not a tidy-up: the `if
(!m_evalMode)` guard on UpdateClassPriors is exactly what silently
disabled the imbalance correction for entire runs two commits ago. Dead
machinery that still reads like live machinery is this codebase's most
expensive recurring bug, and leaving 28 more instances of it would have
been indefensible.
The panel's tuning-progress state goes too - tuning no longer takes long
enough to need one.
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every removal below is FINGERPRINT-NEUTRAL by construction: each retired
input is pinned to the exact value it already shipped with, so running
models keep their filenames and resume rather than restarting at era 0.
Verified field by field against BuildConfigFingerprint.
Removed as inputs, kept as pinned constants (the value was never a
preference the user had a basis to change):
- OutputNeuronsCount. The regression head predicts a continuous quantity
the triple-barrier label does not contain; the target is an EVENT, so
the right output is its probability. The regression code paths stay
implemented and dormant - they cost nothing and removing them would
touch every scoring path at once.
- MinRecall. A safety floor, not a preference, and the only direction a
user can move it is the harmful one: raising it past what the config
reaches yields NO model, not a better one (observed repeatedly at 60).
- SwingConfirmationBars. Stopped gating the labels with the relabel, but
is STILL load-bearing for the swing-context input features - it is the
ZigZag repainting embargo, and without it those 9 features read a leg
the live bar could not have had yet. Pinned, not deleted.
- MaxErasPerRun (runaway backstop, never reached in a healthy run),
FreezePriorCalibration (unanswerable by a user; near-balanced labels
make the priors stable anyway), VerboseMode (developer view, joins
DebuggingMode), MACD/Ichimoku periods x6 (both indicators ship
disabled, and as optimizer dimensions they are pure overfitting
surface - the AI auto-tuner is the supported way to move them).
- SignalClusterWindow -> 3, no longer an input. Barrier labels make
consecutive setups real, which argued for 0; it is not 0 because on D1+
a 6-bar window spans over a week and two arrows a day apart on a
weekly-scale move are one event. 3 splits it correctly by timeframe.
- EnableOnlineLearning -> ON. Adapting to a changing market is what keeps
a months-attached model from going stale, and the rolling-accuracy
freeze is what makes it safe. See the caveat noted in the handoff: it
had not been forward-tested on a live feed when this became default.
Removed entirely:
- Intraday Time Filter (5 inputs + Signals/SignalITF.mqh). Two of its
five inputs were raw BITMASKS, which is an implementation detail
exposed as a control. The job is covered three times over by things
that are declarative or that learn: the session filter, the
time-of-day/day-of-week input features (the network discovers which
hours are good rather than being told), and the journal's time buckets.
- Market Depth Filter (5 inputs + Signals/SignalMarketDepth.mqh, plus
its OnInit probe and OnDeinit release). It needs real level-2 data
that this broker - and most retail MT5 brokers - do not provide, so
the module has never once executed against real data. Shipping four
tuning dropdowns for an untested path is worse than shipping nothing:
the only users who could enable it would be its first-ever testers,
live. If DOM returns it should be a FEATURE fed to the network, not a
rule-based veto with hand-tuned thresholds - imbalance is data.
- IndicatorTuneTrials, replaced by ComputeTuneTrialBudget(). The useful
budget depends on how many parameters are actually being searched,
which depends on which features are enabled - so one number meant
wildly different things run to run. The shipped 32 was ~10 candidates
per dimension against one enabled indicator (wasteful: each costs
GA_SEEDS full training runs) and under one per dimension against all
nine (blind). Now population ~ 4 x active dimensions, clamped [8,64],
with CADIndicatorTuner::ActiveDimensions() defined immediately above
PerturbRandom() so the two cannot drift apart.
- Six orphaned enums (TUNE_TRIALS_PRESET, DOM_*, ENTRY_HOUR_OF_DAY,
TIME_FILTER_DAY_OF_WEEK), 81 lines.
Other UX:
- SL_ATR_x1 / TP_ATR_x3 now carry the "(classic)" default marker every
other preset enum in the file already used. Nothing in the SL/TP
dropdowns previously told a user which pair was the shipped default -
which matters far more since the relabel, because those two define the
labels and changing either forces a retrain.
- Neural Network section moved directly ABOVE AI Input Features: choose
the architecture, then choose what it sees. NN Optimizer / Performance
stays last - the Adam/Sgd inputs are declared in AI/Network.mqh and
render immediately after that divider.
- News feature + window moved to the end of the AI feature list, below
Wyckoff Bar Inversion.
- Dropped "(0-100)" from Min vote to open - it is an enum, not a number.
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings. No retrain forced.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Add MACD_FAST, MACD_SLOW, MACD_SIGNAL presets and Ichimoku Tenkan, Kijun, Senkou presets to InputEnums.mqh. All combinations are designed to satisfy the respective indicator's validation rules (fast < slow for MACD, Tenkan < Kijun < Senkou B for Ichimoku), eliminating init errors and allowing the auto-tuner to perturb settings independently.
Introduce VOTE_CLOSE_PRESETS enum with a Disabled option (value 101) that bypasses vote-driven position closing via arithmetic thresholding, removing the need for a separate boolean flag. This ensures positions exit only via stop-loss, take-profit, or trailing when disabled.
Add `MA_TYPE_PRESETS` enum covering advanced (ALMA, DEMA, ZLEMA, T3, Kalman) and standard (SMA, EMA, SMMA, LWMA) moving averages. Integrate `maType` and `bestMaType` into `CADIndicatorTuner` struct, update flatten/unflatten routines, and bump `AD_TUNE_PARAM_COUNT` to 33. This allows the auto-tuner to search over MA type alongside period, improving feature discovery.
- Added optional `weighScale` parameter (default -1.0) to `CNeuronBase::Init` and `CLayer::CreateElement`.
- Updated `CNeuronPool::Init` to use LeCun-uniform scaling (1/sqrt(window+1)) for its base initialization.
- Updated `CNet::CNet` to use He-scaled initialization (sqrt(2/neurons)) for dense layers.
- These changes enable more flexible and statistically sound weight initialization, matching the rationale used in OCL-based implementations, leading to better training stability and convergence.
CExpertSignalAIBase (4,326 lines, one class) carried 5 struct
definitions, 10 member fields, and 3 methods (Flatten/Unflatten/
PerturbRandom) purely for the AutoTuneIndicators search-space state -
entirely self-contained (never touches Net, Train()'s resumable state
machine, or anything else in the class). Extracted into a new
Expert/ADIndicatorTuner.mqh (CADIndicatorTuner), held as a single
m_indicatorTuner member.
TuneIndicatorsAndTrain() itself - the outer loop that actually
orchestrates Train()/Net/checkpointing around this tuner - turned out
to be exactly as tightly coupled to Train()'s resumable state machine
as Train() itself, so per the same caution already applied to Train()
in this refactor pass, it stays in CExpertSignalAIBase rather than
being pulled into the collaborator; it now calls the tuner's public
Flatten()/Unflatten()/PerturbRandom()/SaveAsBest()/RestoreBest()
instead of manipulating the structs inline.
All internal field-access renames (m_adCumDeltaParams.lookback ->
m_indicatorTuner.adCumDelta.lookback, etc., ~40 sites across the 5
InitAD*() indicator-setup methods) verified against a full grep sweep
- no leftover references to the old field/method names. Compiled
clean (MetaEditor, 0 errors/0 warnings).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
