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 work with market data

Market data results from the placement and processing of buy and sell orders in the course of the trading of financial instruments on the many marketplaces. The data reflects the institutional environment of trading venues, including the rules and regulations that govern orders, trade execution, and price formation.

Algorithmic traders use ML algorithms to analyze the flow of buy and sell orders and the resulting volume and price statistics to extract trade signals or features that capture insights into, for example, demand-supply dynamics or the behavior of certain market participants.

We will first review institutional features that impact the simulation of a trading strategy during a backtest. Then, we will take a look at how tick data can be reconstructed from the order book source. Next, we will highlight several methods that regularize tick data...