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 use DL libraries

Currently, the most popular DL libraries are TensorFlow (supported by Google), Keras (led by Francois Chollet, now at Google), and PyTorch (supported by Facebook). Development is very active, with PyTorch just having released version 1.0 and TensorFlow 2.0 expected in early Spring 2019, when it is expected to adopt Keras as its main interface.

All libraries provide the building blocks we discussed previously under Design choices, regularization and optimization algorithms, and facilitate fast training on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The libraries differ a bit in their focus with TensorFlow, which was originally designed for deployment in production, and Keras, which is more tailored for fast prototyping, although the interfaces are gradually converging.

We will illustrate the use of these libraries using the same network architecture and dataset as...