Sharpen Quality Investing: A PLS-based Approach Jiao, Zixuan Finance Asset Pricing Dimension Reduction Extreme Market Machine Learning PLS Quality Factor I apply a disciplined dimension reduction technique called Partial Least Square (PLS) to construct a new quality factor by aggregating information from 16 individual signals. It earns significant risk-adjusted returns and outperforms quality factors constructed by alternative techniques, namely, PCA, Fama-Macbeth regression, a combination of PCA and Fama-Mabeth regression and a Rank-based approach. I show that my quality factor performs even better during rough economic patches and thus appears to hedge periods of market distress. I further show adding our quality factor to an opportunity set consisting of the other classical factors increases the maximum Sharpe ratio. Cooper, Ricky 2022 Dissertation application/pdf islandora:1024869 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/islandora:1024869 Illinois Institute of Technology SSB / Stuart School of Business en In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access