Wait it's all boosting? A framework for alpha discovery

A few days ago, I had the realization that nearly every profitable trading alpha I’ve found can be formalized as an instance of boosting—adding a small, targeted correction on top of a strong base model. This is obvious to seasoned practitioners, but I’ve found it to be a surprisingly useful mental checklist when evaluating new ideas. A simplistic boosting algorithm Fit a model \(f_1(x)\) to \(y\)…