I am looking for some seminal papers regarding machine learning being applied to financial markets, I am interested in all areas of finance however to keep this question specific I am now looking at academic papers on machine learning applied to financial markets.
I come across the following paper which covers much of the theory behind extreme gradient boosting with a financial markets application, they were able to predict the direction of the market with 88% accuracy.
R-bloggers did a post a few months ago on this exact same idea.
https://www.r-bloggers.com/forecasting-markets-using-extreme-gradient-boosting-xgboost/