Investors want to know logic behind machine learning

Winton researcher tells conference he would sacrifice performance if it meant understanding how machine-learning algorithm works

Machine-learning techniques that are rapidly being pursued by quant hedge funds need to be interpretable for investors to buy into them, Tuncer Aysal, a researcher at Winton, has warned.

Speaking at a big data conference in London in June, he said: "It's really hard to explain to a client, give me $10 million, I'll just pass it through this black box and it tells me to buy some Apple shares... Trust me it's going to work. That's a hard sell."

He said the positions generated through machine