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)

Separating signal and noise – how to use alphalens

Quantopian has open sourced the Python library, alphalens, for the performance analysis of predictive stock factors that integrates well with the backtesting library zipline and the portfolio performance and risk analysis library pyfolio that we will explore in the next chapter.

alphalens facilitates the analysis of the predictive power of alpha factors concerning the:

  • Correlation of the signals with subsequent returns
  • Profitability of an equal or factor-weighted portfolio based on a (subset of) the signals
  • Turnover of factors to indicate the potential trading costs
  • Factor-performance during specific events
  • Breakdowns of the preceding by sector

The analysis can be conducted using tearsheets or individual computations and plots. The tearsheets are illustrated in the online repo to save some space.

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