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)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the important topic of portfolio management, which involves the combination of investment positions with the objective of managing risk-return trade-offs. We introduced pyfolio to compute and visualize key risk and return metrics and to compare the performance of various algorithms.

We saw how important accurate predictions are to optimize portfolio weights and maximize diversification benefits. We also explored how ML can facilitate more effective portfolio construction by learning hierarchical relationships from the asset-returns covariance matrix.

We will now move on to the second part of this book, which focuses on the use of ML models. These models will produce more accurate predictions by making more effective use of more diverse information to capture more complex patterns than the simpler alpha factors that were most prominent so far...