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)

Next Steps

The goal of this book was to enable you to apply machine learning (ML) to a variety of data sources and the extract signals useful for the design and execution of an investment strategy. To this end, we introduced ML as an important element in the trading strategy process. We saw that ML can add value at multiple steps in the process of designing, testing, executing, and evaluating a strategy.

It became clear that the core value proposition of ML consists of the ability to extract actionable information from much larger amounts of data more systematically than human experts would ever be able to. On the one hand, this value proposition has really gained currency with the explosion of digital data that made it both more promising and necessary to leverage computing power for data processing. On the other hand, the application of ML still requires significant human intervention...