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)

Linear Models

The family of linear models represents one of the most useful hypothesis classes. Many learning algorithms that are widely applied in algorithmic trading rely on linear predictors because they can be efficiently trained in many cases, they are relatively robust to noisy financial data, and they have strong links to the theory of finance. Linear predictors are also intuitive, easy to interpret, and often fit the data reasonably well or at least provide a good baseline.

Linear regression has been known for over 200 years when Legendre and Gauss applied it to astronomy and began to analyze its statistical properties. Numerous extensions have since adapted the linear regression model and the baseline ordinary least squares (OLS) method to learn its parameters:

  • Generalized linear models (GLM) expand the scope of applications by allowing for response variables that imply...