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 RNNs work

RNNs assume that data is sequential so that previous data points impact the current observation and are relevant for predictions of subsequent elements in the sequence.

They allow for more complex and diverse input-output relationships than FFNNs and CNNs, which are designed to map one input to one output vector, usually of a fixed size, and using a given number of computational steps. RNNs, in contrast, can model data for tasks where the input, the output, or both, are best represented as a sequence of vectors.

The following diagram, inspired by Andrew Karpathy's 2015 blog post on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNN (you can refer to GitHub for more information, here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Machine-Learning-for-Algorithmic-Trading), illustrates mappings from input to output vectors using non-linear transformations carried out by one or...