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)

Learning from data

There have been many definitions of ML, which all revolve around the automated detection of meaningful patterns in data. Two prominent examples include:

  • AI pioneer Arthur Samuelson defined ML in 1959 as a subfield of computer science that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.
  • Toni Mitchell, one of the current leaders in the field, pinned down a well-posed learning problem more specifically in 1998: a computer program learns from experience with respect to a task and a performance measure whether the performance of the task improves with experience.

Experience is presented to an algorithm in the form of training data. The principal difference to previous attempts at building machines that solve problems is that the rules that an algorithm uses to make decisions are learned from the data as opposed to being programmed or...