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)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the use of the zipline library for the event-driven simulation of a trading algorithm, both offline and on the Quantopian online platform. We have illustrated the design and evaluation of individual alpha factors to derive signals for an algorithmic trading strategy from market, fundamental, and alternative data, and demonstrated a naive way of combining multiple factors. We also introduced the alphalens library that permits the comprehensive evaluation of the predictive performance and trading turnover of signals.

The portfolio construction process, in turn, takes a broader perspective and aims at the optimal sizing of positions from a risk and return perspective. We will now turn to various strategies to balance risk and returns in a portfolio process. We will also look in more detail at the challenges of backtesting trading strategies on...