Code: SCI3086
Extent: 20-25 cr
Language: English
Organizing department: Industrial Engineering and Management
Teachers in charge: Mikko Jääskeläinen, Ruth Kaila (coordinating teacher), Ahti Salo
Administrative contact: Tarja Timonen
Target group: All master's level students with sufficient prerequisite knowledge
Application procedure: Open for all students of Aalto University. It is recommended that the student discuss the choice of courses with Ruth Kaila.
Quotas and restrictions: No quotas for the minor, but some elective courses may have space for a limited number of students. The minor is available for master’s level students.
Prerequisites: The minor requires basic knowledge in engineering mathematics and probability theory. Bachelor-level minor SCI3034 Systems Sciences is warmly recommended.
Content and structure of the minor
Financial engineering is the application of quantitative methods to solve problems arising in the practice of finance. As a discipline, it combines financial theory and applied mathematics with the use of computational methods and tools.
Finance is becoming increasingly demanding due to the continual development of new financial products, availability of big data sets, rapid technological advances, and changes in regulation. This has created a growing demand for financial risk management and opportunities for advanced quantitative analysis.
The minor in Financial Engineering provides students with a good understanding of financial mathematics and equips them with methodological and computational skills. Thus, the students are set to pursue successful careers in banking, insurance, risk management and consulting, or to become quantitative analysts for instance in the finance departments of manufacturing and service firms.
The minor consist of 10-15 credits of compulsory core courses and 5-15 credits of elective courses from three subject areas (i) systems and operations research, (ii) computational methods, (iii) advanced topics in finance.
Code | Name | Credits | Period |
Core courses (10-15 cr) | |||
| Mandatory: | |||
Financial Engineering I | 5 | I-II | |
| One or two of the following courses: | |||
| TU-E2220 | Financial Engineering II | 5 | III |
| MS-E2114 | Investment Science* | 5 | I-II |
Elective courses (5-15 cr) | |||
| The credit requirement is fullfilled by completing sufficiently many courses from the following. Any courses except those from the subject area of the student's major can be selected. | |||
Mathematical methods (Dept of Mathematics and Systems Analysis) | |||
Introduction to Optimization | 5 | IV | |
Stochastic Processes | 5 | I | |
| Multivariate Statistical Analysis | 5 | III-IV | |
Risk Analysis | 5 | III-IV | |
Seminar on Case Studies in Operation Research | 5-7 | III-IV | |
Computational Methods (Dept of Computer Science) | |||
| Choose of one the following: | |||
| CS-C3240 | Machine Learning | 5 | III-IV |
| OR | |||
| CS-E4710 | Machine Learning: Supervised Methods | 5 | I-II |
| CS-E4650 | Methods of Data Mining | 5 | I-II |
| CS-E4890 | Deep Learning | 5 | IV-V |
| CS-E4830 | Kernel Methods in Machine Learning | 5 | III-V |
| CS-E5710 | Bayesian Data Analysis | 5 | I-II |
| Any course in programming | |||
Selected topics in Finance (Dept of Finance) | |||
| 28C00300 | Investment Management *, ** | 6 | III |
| 28E35100 | Corporate Financial Management** | 6 | I |
| 28C00800 | Financial Markets and Institutions** | 6 | II |
| TU-EV | Course with varying content | ||
*Choose either MS-E2114 or 28C00300 but not both as they are largely overlapping.
**Limited admission based on study success; applications should be sent to the coordinating teacher, ruth.kaila(at)aalto.fi, latest one week before the course starts.