Writing can be a very creative process and I've been fortunate enough to experience this several times: with my PhD thesis, papers, books, ideas journals… and now blog posts.

The new elastic classifier functions are an example of flash inspiration that just came to me while I was writing the post "Function Design: New 3-6 Output Functions". I had just finished describing how the mapper functions worked when another new class of functions just came to me almost without conscious effort, and I just kept writing and thinking: "Now I just need to check how they work."

I had to postpone my post and wait for the next day to implement and test these new functions. I ended up designing four new 3-output elastic classifiers, that are elastic versions of the 3-output classifier functions described in the posts "Function Design: The BUY-SELL-WAIT Function" and "Function Design: More 3-Output Classifier Functions".

So, the first elastic classifier function in the series – ECL3A – is a function of 3 arguments and implements an elastic version of the BUY-SELL-WAIT function (implemented as CL3A in GeneXproTools). And its performance is even better than the BUY-SELL-WAIT function, with 98% vs 96%! And here's the C++ code for this new function:

    // ECL3A(x0,x1,x2): 3-Output Elastic Classifier Function
    if (x[1] > x[0] && x[2] < x[0])
        return 1.0;
    else if (x[1] < x[0] && x[2] > x[0])
        return -1.0;
    else return 0.0;

The second function in the series – ECL3B – is the elastic counterpart of the CL3C function. Both these functions perform quite well, both of them with a high hit rate of 98%:

    // ECL3B(x0,x1,x2): 3-Output Elastic Classifier Function
    if (x[1] > x[0] && x[2] > x[0])
        return 1.0;
    else if (x[1] < x[0] && x[2] < x[0])
        return -1.0;
    else return 0.0;

The third function in the series – ECL3C – is an elastic implementation of the CL3B function and it performs slightly worse than the inelastic form, with 95% vs 97%:

    // ECL3C(x0,x1,x2): 3-Output Elastic Classifier Function
    if (x[1] >= x[0] && x[2] >= x[0])
        return 1.0;
    else if (x[1] <= -x[0] && x[2] <= -x[0])
        return -1.0;
    else return 0.0;

And finally, the fourth function in the series – ECL3D – is also an elastic version of the CL3B function, with the difference that it uses the first 2 arguments as anchoring points that work as reference for the mapping. This function performs slightly better than the CL3B function (98% vs 97%) and also better than the ECL3C described above (98% vs 95%):

    // ECL3D(x0,x1,x2,x3): 3-Output Elastic Classifier Function
    // evaluate min(x,y) and max(x,y)
    double min = x[0];
    double max = x[1];
    if (min > x[1])
    {
        min = x[1];
        max = x[0];
    }

    if (x[2] >= max && x[3] >= max)
        return 1.0;
    else if (x[2] <= min && x[3] <= min)
        return -1.0;
    else return 0.0;

Over the next posts I'll start talking about the implementation of all these new math functions in all the programming languages supported by GeneXproTools.