About
Dr Sasan Barak is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Business Analytics within Southampton Business School, University of Southampton. He is also Departmental Head of Research (DHoR) for Decision Analytics and Risk Department.
Dr Barak is a quant researcher with a background in Finance and Business Analytics. He teaches and conducts research in the fields of Finance Machine Learning, Forecasting, R and Python Programming, and Machine Learning in Business Analytics.
As an international lecturer, he also conducts some international lectures in the Middle East and Europe. He is also keen on entrepreneurship and launching startup companies in the fund management field.
He has been invited as an external PhD examiner to several international universities such as the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) and Rabbat Business School (Morocco).
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Research
Research interests
- Financial Machine Learning (including Portfolio Optimisation, Algorithmic Trading)
- Forecasting (Model Selection, Meta-Learning, Deep Learning)
- Statistical and Machine Learning Algorithms in Analytics
Current research
Sasan's main area of research revolves around forecasting model selection using Meta-learning and Deep Learning approaches and implementing statistical and machine learning algorithms for business time series analysis.
Moreover, Sasan is keen on machine learning applications in finance, while he has a research group and a startup related to this topic.
His past work includes studies on Forecasting energy consumption; Evaluating stocks by features selections and data mining methods; Fusion of multiple diverse predictors, and Evaluation and selection of clustering methods. He is also interested in Multi-Criteria Decision Making and Multi-objective optimization, while he obtained some international research grants related to these topics.
He has been an active researcher in the field of data analytics and decision making, and the outcome of his research has appeared in leading analytics journals such as European Journal of Operational Research, International Journal of Production Economics, Expert System with Applications, Information Fusion, and International Journal of Production Research. He is the principal investigator of two European grant projects funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GACR).
Primary research centres:
Department:
Department of Decision Analytics and Risk
Member of:
- International Institute of Forecasters (IIF)
- International Association of Engineers (IAENG)
- Britain Operations Research Society (ORS)
- European Institute of Industrial Engineering (IIE)
Reviewer:
- “Applied Soft Computing”,
- “European Journal of Operational Research”,
- “Expert systems with applications”,
- “Journal of Cleaner Production”
PhD Research Grants:
- ESRC Grant for Advance Quantitative Method Project (AQM) at Lancaster University, UK
- Full scholarship from Università degli studi di Bergamo
Grants:
Principal Investigator:
- Southampton Business School Small Research Fund: Internet of Things (IoT) Time Series Analysis Using Deep learning
- GACR - Multi-Objective Optimization Application in Flexible Manufacturing and Project Scheduling Problems: Theory and Applications (2018-2020) Grant No. GA 18-15530S (125,000GBP)
- GACR - Multiple Criteria Decision Making Modelling: Novel Weighting Methods and Hybrid Approaches (2017-2018) Grant No. GA 17-22662S (55,000GBP)
Research Team:
European project – Operational Programme Education for Competitiveness. Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport of the Czech Republic: OP VK (Project No. CZ.1.07/2.3.00/20.0296): Research team member for modelling of economic and financial processes
Research Grant for GACR project (GA18-13951S): New approaches to financial time series modelling based on soft computing
Research Grant for GACR project (GA16-17810S): Selective measures in data envelopment analysis: Theory and Applications
Research Grant for GACR project (GA 15-23699S): Risk Probability Functional and Ordering Theory Applied to International Financial Markets and Portfolio Selection Problems
Research Grant for GACR project (GA 14-31593S): Examining allocative efficiency through network data envelopment analysis
Other achievements :
- Best PhD Thesis Award in Czech Business Schools
- Winner of the 2013 Iranian National Elites Foundation award (INEF)
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Research groups
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Current research
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Publications
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Supervision
Current PhD Students
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Teaching
Machine Learning in Finance
Business Forecasting
Advanced Analytics
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Biography
Sasan received his PhD in Management Science from Lancaster University Management School. Moreover, he has been awarded a double degree PhD (with two PhD diplomas) from the Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic (in the field of quantitative methods in finance), and the University of Bergamo, Italy (in the field of Analytics for Economics and Business).
Prior to joining the University of Southampton, Sasan was a Research Assistant and Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University Management School (LUMS), Centre of Marketing Analytics and Forecasting.
Moreover, he was a Senior Researcher at the Technical University of Ostrava (VSB), Czech Republic.
Qualifications:
- BSc (Industrial Engineering)
- MSc (Industrial Engineering)
- PhD (Finance)
- PhD (Operational Research)
Non-academic Work Experience:
- CEO and Founder: Deep Finance Capital (DFO)
For more information: deepfinancecapital.org
- 2013-present: Fund Manager and Algorithmic Trading Strategist in Stock, Forex, and Commodity markets
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Prizes
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