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 optimize neural network architectures

In practice, we need to explore variations of the design options outlined previously because we can rarely be sure from the outset of which network architecture best suits the data.

The GridSearchCV class provided by scikit-learn that we encountered in Chapter 6, The Machine Learning Process, conveniently automates this process. Just be mindful of the risk of false discoveries and keep track of how many experiments you are running to adjust the results accordingly.

In this section, we will explore various options to build a simple feedforward neural network to predict asset price movement for a one-month horizon. See the how_to_optimize_a_NN_architecure notebook for details.

Creating a stock return series to predict asset price movement

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