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)

Topic Modeling

In the last chapter, we converted unstructured text data into a numerical format using the bag-of-words model. This model abstracts from word order and represents documents as word vectors, where each entry represents the relevance of a token to the document.

The resulting document-term matrix (DTM), (you may also come across the transposed term-document matrix) is useful to compare documents to each other or to a query vector based on their token content, and quickly find a needle in a haystack or classify documents accordingly.

However, this document model is both high-dimensional and very sparse. As a result, it does little to summarize the content or get closer to understanding what it is about. In this chapter, we will use unsupervised machine learning in the form of topic modeling to extract hidden themes from documents. These themes can produce detailed insights...