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)

Summary

In this chapter, we presented the specialized RNN architecture, which is tailored to sequential data. We covered how RNNs work, analyzed a computational graph, and saw how RNNs enable parameter sharing over numerous steps to capture long-range dependencies that FFNNs and CNNs are not well suited for.

We also reviewed the challenges of vanishing and exploding gradients and saw how gate units such as LSTM cells enable RNNs to learn dependencies over hundreds of time steps. Finally, we applied RNN models to challenges common in algorithmic trading, such as predicting univariate and multivariate time series and sentiment analysis.

In the next chapter, we will introduce unsupervised deep learning techniques, such as autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and their applications in investment and trading strategies.

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