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)

Convolutional Neural Networks

In this chapter, we introduce the first of various specialized deep learning architectures that we will cover in part four. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), also known as ConvNets, have enabled superhuman performance in classifying images, video, speech, and audio. Recurrent nets, the subject of the following chapter, have performed exceptionally well on sequential data such as text and speech.

CNNs are named after the linear algebra operation called convolution, which replaces the general matrix multiplication typical of feedforward networks (see Chapter 16, Deep Learning) in at least one of their layers. We will discuss how convolutions work, and why they are particularly useful to data with a certain regular structure, such as images and time series.

Research into CNN architectures has proceeded very rapidly, and new architectures that...