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 explored linear time series models for the univariate case of individual series as well as multivariate models for several interacting series. We encountered applications that predict macro fundamentals, models that forecast asset or portfolio volatility with widespread use in risk management, as well as multivariate VAR models that capture the dynamics of multiple macro series, as well as the concept of cointegration, which underpins the popular pair-trading strategy.

Similar to the previous chapter, we saw how linear models add a lot of structure to the model, that is, they make strong assumptions that potentially require transformations and extensive testing to verify that these assumptions are met. If they are, model-training and -interpretation is straightforward, and the models provide a good baseline case that more complex models may be able...