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)

Alpha Factor Research

Algorithmic trading strategies are driven by signals that indicate when to buy or sell assets to generate positive returns relative to a benchmark. The portion of an asset's return that is not explained by exposure to the benchmark is called alpha, and hence these signals are also called alpha factors.

Alpha factors aim to predict the price movements of assets in the investment universe based on the available market, fundamental, or alternative data. A factor may combine one or several input variables, but assumes a single value for each asset every time the strategy evaluates the factor. Trade decisions typically rely on relative values across assets. Trading strategies are often based on signals emitted by multiple factors, and we will see that machine learning (ML) models are particularly well suited to integrate the various signals efficiently to...