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)

The market for alternative data

The investment industry is going to spend an estimated to $2,000,000,000-3,000,000,000 on data services in 2018, and this number is expected to grow at double digits per year in line with other industries. This expenditure includes the acquisition of alternative data, investments in related technology, and the hiring of qualified talent.

A survey by Ernst and Young shows significant adoption of alternative data in 2017; 43% of funds are using scraped web data, for instance, and almost 30% are experimenting with satellite data. Based on the experience so far, fund managers considered scraped web data and credit card data to be most insightful, in contrast to geolocation and satellite data, which around 25% considered to be less informative:

Reflecting the rapid growth of this new industry, the market for alternative data providers is quite fragmented...