PortLearn

PortLearn is a finance-first research framework for controlled, reproducible, and modular experimentation in machine-learned portfolio choice.

Change the research component without accidentally changing the financial experiment.

PortLearn is being developed to support comparable portfolio-learning research across classical methods, forecasting-based machine learning, direct deep learning, reinforcement learning, optimization-based approaches, and user-defined research components under common financial experiment contracts.

Status

PortLearn is in early development and has not yet been published as a stable package release. The current public surface exposes the research foundation and API contracts. The public API is not yet stable.

Design Direction

PortLearn aims to provide reusable infrastructure for:

• financial data and information-set construction;
• modular feature engineering;
• portfolio strategy composition;
• common portfolio accounting;
• controlled comparison of alternative methods;
• research reproducibility and provenance.

PortLearn is a research toolkit, not a repository for individual paper-specific models or unpublished research architectures.

Brand Assets

The PortLearn logo and icon set live in docs/assets/brand/, with usage guidance (which lockup for which context, including PyPI presentation) in docs/assets/brand/README.md.

Roadmap

PortLearn is under active research development. This roadmap is intentionally high-level: it communicates broad direction only, is subject to change as the research framework develops, and does not promise dates or specific functionality.

Available now

• Research foundation: time/chronology contracts, observation handling, information sets, and the core research interfaces that define how portfolio research components compose.
• Validation utilities for detecting violations of point-in-time information contracts.
• Canonical run manifests for recording environment and command provenance.
• Data access: a researcher-facing data facade (portlearn.data) with Fama/French and FRED provider adapters, a sealed research-dataset container with pandas conversion, and availability-aware alignment of mixed-frequency observations on a period calendar.
• Chronologically valid feature transforms: lags, rolling statistics, scalers, and carry-forward.
• Contracts for the forecasting and estimation lifecycle (fitting, refitting, forecast timing, tuning, seeds, determinism, provenance); estimators are not provided yet.
• Descriptive research-dataset diagnostics (summary, correlation, coverage, missingness) with renderer-neutral plotting; rendering is available through the optional plot extra.
• Portfolio weights: target-weight validation, weight books, and the closed portfolio-role vocabulary, under the portlearn.weights module.
• Rebalancing: schedule policies and the drift law that carries held weights across holding segments (portlearn.rebalance).
• Transaction ledger: segment-composed accounting over the wealth path, built on immutable per-period ledger records with retained execution details, and the reference accounting engine (portlearn.ledger).
• Trading and cost accounting: cost-aware transaction and turnover accounting with proportional cost models (portlearn.trades, portlearn.turnover, portlearn.costs).
• The strategy decision-contract seam: Strategy.decide(context) -> DecisionResult over DecisionContext — the decision-time aggregate of forecast, information, holdings, and strategy state — validated by require_decision_result_compatible.
• Strategies: the built-in classical strategies — equal weight, inverse volatility, minimum variance, and mean-variance (portlearn.strategies).

Next

• Forecasting and estimation methods that implement the lifecycle contracts.
• Experiment and reproducibility infrastructure.

Planned

• Later deep-learning and reinforcement-learning research capabilities.

Entries move forward on this roadmap as the underlying research foundation stabilizes; nothing here is a dated commitment.

Development

The local development battery, from a fresh clone:

uv sync --locked
uv run ruff check .
uv run pytest
uv build
uv run python scripts/verify_built_wheel.py