This course, offered by the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Economics, allows you to specialise in modern quantitative finance and computational methods for financial modelling, which are demanded for jobs in asset structuring, product pricing as well as risk management. Skills that you will acquire include the ability to: analyse, critically evaluate, and apply methods of computational finance to practical problems, including pricing of derivatives and risk assessment analyse and critically evaluate methods and general principles of computational finance and their applicability to specific problems work with methods and techniques such as clustering, regression, support vector machines, boosting, decision trees, and neural networks analyse and critically evaluate applicability of machine learning algorithms to problems in finance implement methods of computational finance and machine learning using object-oriented programming languages and modern data management systems work with software packages such as MATLAB and R work with Relational Database Systems and SQL You will be taught by world-leading academics. Research in Machine Learning at Royal Holloway started in the 1990’s, at which time V. Vapnik and A. Chervonenkis (the inventors of Support Vector Machines) were both professors here. We have developed both fundamental theory and practical algorithms that have fed into the analytics methods and techniques that are in use today. Current researchers include Alexander Gammerman and Vladimir Vovk – the inventors of conformal predictors theory, a radically new method of estimating the accuracy of each prediction as it is made – and Chris Watkins, originator of reinforcement learning who developed ‘Q-learning’, a work that is fundamental to planning and control.

Demand for data scientists is buoyant, in the UK and worldwide, with salaries much higher than other IT professions and at least double the UK average full time wage. Our graduates have an excellent track record of finding jobs at the end of (if not during) their studies. We bring several companies to our campus throughout the year, both for fairs and for delivering advanced topics seminars, which are an excellent opportunity to learn about what they do and discuss possible placements or jobs. Together with the Royal Holloway Careers and Employability Service, we offer you workshops and one-to-one coaching that prepare you to find a placement or a job and lead a successful career.