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)

Learning latent topics: goals and approaches

Topic modeling aims to discover hidden topics or themes across documents that capture semantic information beyond individual words. It aims to address a key challenge in building a machine learning algorithm that learns from text data by going beyond the lexical level of what has been written to the semantic level of what was intended. The resulting topics can be used to annotate documents based on their association with various topics.

In other words, topic modeling aims to automatically summarize large collections of documents to facilitate organization and management, as well as search and recommendations. At the same time, it can enable the understanding of documents to the extent that humans can interpret the descriptions of topics.

Topic models aim to address the curse of dimensionality that can plague the bag-of-words model....