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)

Key takeaways and lessons learned

Important insights to keep in mind as you proceed to the practice of ML for trading include:

  • Data is the single most important ingredient
  • Domain expertise helps realize the potential value in the data, especially in finance
  • ML offers tools for many use cases that should be further developed and combined to create solutions for new problems using data
  • The choice of model objectives and performance diagnostics are key to productive iterations towards an optimal system
  • Backtest overfitting is a huge challenge that requires significant attention
  • Transparency around black-box models can help build confidence and facilitate adoption

We will elaborate a bit more on each of these ideas.

Data is the single most important ingredient

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