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)

How word embeddings encode semantics

The bag-of-words model represents documents as vectors that reflect the tokens they contain. Word embeddings represent tokens as lower dimensional vectors so that their relative location reflects their relationship in terms of how they are used in context. They embody the distributional hypothesis from linguistics that claims words are best defined by the company they keep.

Word vectors are capable of capturing numerous semantic aspects; not only are synonyms close to each other, but words can have multiple degrees of similarity, for example, the word driver could be similar to motorist or to cause. Furthermore, embeddings reflect relationships among pairs of words such as analogies (Tokyo is to Japan what Paris is to France, or went is to go what saw is to see) as we will illustrate later in this section.

Embeddings result from training a...