Book Image

Machine Learning for Finance

By : Jannes Klaas
Book Image

Machine Learning for Finance

By: Jannes Klaas

Overview of this book

Machine Learning for Finance explores new advances in machine learning and shows how they can be applied across the financial sector, including insurance, transactions, and lending. This book explains the concepts and algorithms behind the main machine learning techniques and provides example Python code for implementing the models yourself. The book is based on Jannes Klaas’ experience of running machine learning training courses for financial professionals. Rather than providing ready-made financial algorithms, the book focuses on advanced machine learning concepts and ideas that can be applied in a wide variety of ways. The book systematically explains how machine learning works on structured data, text, images, and time series. You'll cover generative adversarial learning, reinforcement learning, debugging, and launching machine learning products. Later chapters will discuss how to fight bias in machine learning. The book ends with an exploration of Bayesian inference and probabilistic programming.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Machine Learning for Finance
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Frontiers of RL


You have now seen the theory behind and application of the most useful RL techniques. Yet, RL is a moving field. This book cannot cover all of the current trends that might be interesting to practitioners, but it can highlight some that are particularly useful for practitioners in the financial industry.

Multi-agent RL

Markets, by definition, include many agents. Lowe and others, 2017, Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Mixed Cooperative-Competitive Environments (see https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.02275), shows that reinforcement learning can be used to train agents that cooperate, compete, and communicate depending on the situation.

Multiple agents (in red) working together to chase the green dots. From the OpenAI blog.

In an experiment, Lowe and others let agents communicate by including a communication vector into the action space. The communication vector that one agent outputted was then made available to other agents. They showed that the agents learned to communicate to solve a...