BuildFeatureWindow() replaces eight hand-rolled copies of the same loop
and feeds the window OLDEST BAR FIRST. Every copy fed it newest-first,
because MQL5 timeseries indices run backwards and `r + b` with b ascending
walks into the past.
Harmless for PAI and CONV - a dense layer learns a weight per position
either way, a conv learns time-mirrored kernels. Not harmless for the
recurrent stacks:
- LSTM_SeqStepForward reads `inputs + t*Iw`, so step t is block t.
- It writes output[] only when t == steps-1: the visible output IS the
last hidden state.
- c_t = f*c_{t-1} + i*g decays toward the start of the sequence.
lstm_seq_flowcheck.cpp measured block 0's influence on the output at
1.2e-2 of block T-1's, at the shipped forget bias of 1.0.
So the bar being PREDICTED sat at the far end of the decay and the output
was handed to the OLDEST bar in the window - the exact inverse of what the
window is for. ~80x backwards on LSTM and HYBRID, on all three tiers
(OpenCL kernel, CPU DLL, pure-MQL5 inference), which is why it never
surfaced as a backend discrepancy.
This does not create edge - the MI diagnostics read at the noise floor
(p=0.4975) with a working positive control. It makes the one hypothesis
those diagnostics explicitly do NOT cover testable: they are marginal and
per-bar, and state they "cannot rule out one that only exists in
combination or across time". The sequence model is the instrument for
across-time structure and it has been crippled, so that hypothesis has
never been honestly tested.
Fingerprint gets an unconditional |WIN:2 - the vector keeps its shape and
its features, so a stale .nnw would load cleanly and run a model fitted to
one ordering against the other, silently. Re-keying every config is the
point, not collateral damage. FORCES A FULL RETRAIN.
Also: the now-relative bar caches are re-keyed on the two live paths.
EnsureBarCachesCapacity() was only ever called from training paths, but
once m_trainingComplete is set ScheduleTrainingIfNeeded() routes every bar
to RefreshConvergedSignal() and Train() is never re-entered - so nothing
cleared the feature cache again for the life of the process. A chart that
trained to convergence kept replaying the rows computed for the last
training era's bar grid: the live signal froze at its convergence-time
value, and OnlineLearnStep() backpropped those stale features against
freshly resolved labels. Backtests were never affected (an inference-only
process never allocates the arrays, so every read recomputes).
Compiles clean: 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
The 31:1 class imbalance was self-inflicted by the TARGET, not a property
of the market. Labelling only the exact bar where a ZigZag pivot confirms
gave Buy 1164 / Sell 1164 / Neutral 35841, and every correction mechanism
this codebase accumulated sits downstream of that one choice: the
logit-adjusted loss and its range cap, the prior EMA, the +-3.0 output-bias
seed, balanced-accuracy-then-precision selection with its coverage floor,
the recall floor and its catch-22, the alternation gate, NMS, and the four
oversampling designs that collapsed before them.
The reference this engine is built on (references/neuronetworksbook.pdf
ch. 3.1/3.3) also uses ZigZag, but targets the DIRECTION TO THE NEXT
EXTREMUM on every bar - ~50/50 by construction, with no imbalance to
correct at all. It never had this problem because it never asked "is this
the pivot bar".
Labels are now the triple barrier (Lopez de Prado ch. 3), using the EA's
OWN SL_Mode/TP_Mode: does a trade opened at this bar's close reach its
target before its stop, within a horizon. Buy = long resolves, Sell =
short resolves, Neutral = neither. Consequences:
- dir-precision in the era line stops being a proxy and becomes the win
rate of the strategy under its own exit rules.
- Expected balance ~25/25/50 at the shipped 1:3 (gambler's ruin), i.e.
~2:1 instead of 31:1. Measured and logged at the end of the prebuild.
- Spread is charged on both legs, so it is a NET win rate.
- Intrabar ambiguity resolves to the STOP. OHLC cannot order two touches
inside one bar and the optimistic reading is how a backtested edge
becomes a live loss.
ZigZag stays as input features (EnableSwingContext) and now also supplies
the vertical barrier: the horizon is the median confirmed leg length,
snapped to a coarse ladder. Derived, not configured, and deliberately kept
out of the filename fingerprint - a filename keyed on a measured quantity
orphans a trained model the moment the measurement moves.
Removed, because the premise died with the old target:
- the alternation gate. Correct for pivot labels (a ZigZag cannot emit two
same-type pivots in a row, so a repeat was provably a false fire), and
wrong for barrier labels, which answer each bar independently. It also
took its worst consequence with it: a one-sided model previously got ONE
trade per backtest, a hard blocker on marketplace validation.
- SignalClusterWindow now defaults off - it de-duplicated repeats that are
now real trades. Kept as an opt-in display control.
- LABEL_WINDOW_BARS, the pivot-widening pass, ConfirmedZigZagLabel.
- the era-0 output-bias seed now needs a genuinely dominant class (0.70)
rather than 0.40; at ~50% Neutral a +-3.0 seed is a distortion, not a
correction.
Also fixed, both found while wiring the above:
1. RefreshConvergedSignal sized its buffers from a date delta
(Bars(sym, period, dtStudied, TimeCurrent())). dtStudied is a training
watermark; in the tester it is loaded from a live-chart save AHEAD of
the simulated date, so the interval inverted, Bars() returned ~0, and
the buffer came out at exactly m_historyBars - deep enough for the OHLC
window and far too shallow for the Donchian-50 / 20-bar-return / SMA
extension behind it. Inference silently computed DIFFERENT features
from the ones training learned on, live as well as in the tester. Now
sized from what the feature builder actually needs.
2. The barrier horizon is resolved on the deployed path too. A deployed
model never enters Train(), so it never reached the prebuild, and
OnlineLearnStep reads the horizon as its confirmation delay - left at
the fallback it would have backpropped bars whose barriers had not
resolved. Silent lookahead in the one place that writes to a live model.
SL_Mode/TP_Mode join the weights fingerprint: they define the labels now,
so a model trained at 1:3 must never be silently reused at 1:1. This
re-keys every pre-existing model by design - none were trained on this task.
Inference census extended with the vote gate. LongCondition/ShortCondition
open with a readiness check the refresh counters never see; in the tester it
reduces to "the seeded _optcache.nnw must have LOADED", and if it did not,
every vote is hard-zeroed while the model still answers Buy. The old three
counters would have read that as "the model says Neutral" - false, and a
completely different fix. This is the leading candidate for the
zero-direction backtest and the census can now name it in one run.
Both builds compile 0 errors / 0 warnings. Forces a full retrain.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The imbalance section offered nine controls for one job. Audited against the
code, five of them did not do what their names said at the shipped defaults:
AILogitPriorStrength DEAD - Inference.mqh's post-hoc prior early-returns
whenever the adjusted loss is on, which is default.
OversampleParity DEAD in training - Training.mqh gated the replay loop
on !useLogitAdjustedLoss (correctly, citing Buda et
al. 2018). Live only in the online-learning path.
EnableMinorityReplay DEAD as replay. It survived ONLY as a focal-gamma
damper - "replay minority bars through pass-2
oversampling" was a focal-loss switch.
ConstrainReplay DEAD as a cap; it only chose damper 0.125 vs 0.25.
UseStaticPrior An exact duplicate of FreezePriorCalibration - the two
were OR'd together in the single place either is read.
So they were not five mechanisms fighting; they were one mechanism plus eight
knobs that mostly described machinery that no longer ran. That is worse than
a real conflict, because the log agreed with the names: the label-cache line
printed "reps up to 28x (90% parity) (seeding era 0's class-balance
oversampling)" on every run, describing an oversampling pass that had been
switched off. It is fixed here too - it cost this session a wrong diagnosis.
The one genuine redundancy was focal loss, running at gamma*0.125 alongside
the adjusted loss: two corrections on the same axis, the exact stacking
failure this file already cited Buda et al. for in two other places, damped
by a replay flag whose replay path was itself dead. Removed rather than
re-tuned. The plateau ladder is unaffected - its escape is the learning-rate
warm restart; the gamma anneal beside it only ever stepped toward zero.
WHAT REMAINS is logit-adjusted loss (Menon et al. 2021) plus a prior freeze:
LogitAdjustTau 0 = off; replaces the separate EnableLogitAdjusted-
Loss boolean, since a strength dial where 0 already
means off does not need an on/off switch beside it.
FreezePriorCalibration unchanged.
It is the only one of the six corrections with a consistency guarantee, and
it is consistent for exactly the balanced-error metric checkpoint selection
already ranks on - so the loss and the deploy decision optimize one thing.
The online continual-learning path keeps its own alpha-balanced focal weight,
now as constants pinned to the removed inputs' shipped defaults, so its
behaviour is unchanged. It legitimately needs its own correction:
ApplyLogitAdjustment() only runs inside a training run, so a deployed model
that was reloaded carries no logit offsets and would otherwise stream 31:1
data into itself uncorrected.
The weights-filename fingerprint is BYTE-IDENTICAL. The focal slot was a
double fed to a %d conversion and had always emitted a literal 0; the |MR:
segment is written as the constant its shipped defaults produced. Dropping
either would have re-keyed every model and forced a from-scratch retrain of
the one topology currently converged and trading.
Also removed as orphans: FOCAL_GAMMA_PRESET, MAX_OVERSAMPLE_REPLICAS,
OVERSAMPLE_PARITY_FRACTION, PLATEAU_GAMMA_STEP, and the now-unreachable
"neutralized by prior correction" diagnostic.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings. No retrain forced.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ExpertSignalAIBase.mqh was 8216 lines: the class declaration followed by 87
method bodies covering training, labelling, feature extraction, persistence,
chart drawing, online learning, the GA auto-tuner and inference, all in one
file. Train() alone is 1492 lines; a change to arrow drawing meant scrolling
past the era loop.
Moved the bodies into Expert\AIBase\, included at the bottom of the original
after the class declaration:
Training.mqh 1607 era loop, plateau ladder, checkpoint select, deploy
Features.mqh 1093 indicator creation + per-bar input feature vector
ChartUI.mqh 634 arrows, arrow persistence, status panel, cleanup
Persistence.mqh 492 .stats/.cfg sidecars, CPU-inference validation, copy
OnlineLearning.mqh 461 live continual learning, EMA shadow, OOS simulator
Labels.mqh 309 ZigZag pivot labels, async label-cache prebuild
AutoTune.mqh 275 genetic tuner (population, crossover, halving)
Inference.mqh 235 softmax, prior calibration, class priors
ExpertSignalAIBase.mqh 8216 -> 3131 (declaration + topology build only)
This is a pure relocation - verified mechanically, not by eye: HEAD's file
reconstructed from the eight partials plus the surviving remainder is
byte-identical to HEAD, span for span (scratchpad verify_split.py). No
declaration moved, no signature changed, no code rewritten, so behaviour is
unchanged by construction.
Compiles 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
AnimateDread