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)

Seeking signals – how to use zipline

Historically, alpha factors used a single input and simple heuristics, thresholds or quantile cutoffs to identify buy or sell signals. ML has proven quite effective in extracting signals from a more diverse and much larger set of input data, including other alpha factors based on the analysis of historical patterns. As a result, algorithmic trading strategies today leverage a large number of alpha signals, many of which may be weak individually but can yield reliable predictions when combined with other model-driven or traditional factors by an ML algorithm.

The open source zipline library is an event-driven backtesting system maintained and used in production by the crowd-sourced quantitative investment fund Quantopian (https://www.quantopian.com/) to facilitate algorithm-development and live-trading. It automates the algorithm&apos...