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 to design a neural network

DL relies on neural networks, which consist of a few key building blocks, which in turn can be configured in a multitude of ways. In this section, we will introduce how neural networks work and illustrate the most important components used to design different architectures, including types of hidden and output units, cost functions, and various options to connect these components.

Neural networks, also called artificial neural networks, were inspired by biological models of learning as represented by the human brain, either in an attempt to mimic how it works and achieve similar success, or to gain a better understanding through simulation. Current neural network research draws less on neuroscience, not least since our understanding of the brain has not yet reached a sufficient level of granularity. Another constraint is overall size: while the number...