Should I expect major performance improvements by scaling my features?

Question

I'm trying to decide whether I should scale my features & responses for training, and I'm in a situation where I can't just try both scaling and not scaling.

My features currently have an std around 0.05, and the behavior of the timeseries I'm studying is very much scale dependent (0.5 means a VERY different thing than a 0.05 in terms of what's happening in the market).

Can I expect major improvements in performance, optimizer-wise, if I scaled my features to have std of 1?

My models are different combinations of MLP and 1d conv, and my algorithm is gradient descent with the Adam optimizer.

Thank you! [and yes; I'm another one of those people who are trying to forecast the stock market]

Louis is right that I should try both. But I'm leaving the question up just in case someone comes along and gives a mathematical proof of exactly normalization is useful /useless.

Answer 1

It's impossible to know whether the performance will improve without knowing what algorithm you are using. Even then the only way to tell is to try both.

That being said, I can't think of any scenario that standardisation would hurt the performance.