Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading

By : Stefan Jansen
Book Image

Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading

By: Stefan Jansen

Overview of this book

The explosive growth of digital data has boosted the demand for expertise in trading strategies that use machine learning (ML). This book enables you to use a broad range of supervised and unsupervised algorithms to extract signals from a wide variety of data sources and create powerful investment strategies. This book shows how to access market, fundamental, and alternative data via API or web scraping and offers a framework to evaluate alternative data. You’ll practice the ML work?ow from model design, loss metric definition, and parameter tuning to performance evaluation in a time series context. You will understand ML algorithms such as Bayesian and ensemble methods and manifold learning, and will know how to train and tune these models using pandas, statsmodels, sklearn, PyMC3, xgboost, lightgbm, and catboost. This book also teaches you how to extract features from text data using spaCy, classify news and assign sentiment scores, and to use gensim to model topics and learn word embeddings from financial reports. You will also build and evaluate neural networks, including RNNs and CNNs, using Keras and PyTorch to exploit unstructured data for sophisticated strategies. Finally, you will apply transfer learning to satellite images to predict economic activity and use reinforcement learning to build agents that learn to trade in the OpenAI Gym.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Gradient boosting machines

AdaBoost can also be interpreted as a stagewise forward approach to minimizing an exponential loss function for a binary y ∈ [-1, 1] at each iteration m to identify a new base learner hm with the corresponding weight αm to be added to the ensemble, as shown in the following formula:

This interpretation of the AdaBoost algorithm was only discovered several years after its publication. It views AdaBoost as a coordinate-based gradient descent algorithm that minimizes a particular loss function, namely exponential loss.

Gradient boosting leverages this insight and applies the boosting method to a much wider range of loss functions. The method enables the design of machine learning algorithms to solve any regression, classification, or ranking problem as long as it can be formulated using a loss function that is differentiable and thus has a...