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)

Shrinkage methods – regularization for linear regression

The least squares methods to train a linear regression model will produce the best, linear, and unbiased coefficient estimates when the Gauss-Markov assumptions are met. Variations like GLS fare similarly well even when OLS assumptions about the error covariance matrix are violated. However, there are estimators that produce biased coefficients to reduce the variance to achieve a lower generalization error overall.

When a linear regression model contains many correlated variables, their coefficients will be poorly determined because the effect of a large positive coefficient on the RSS can be canceled by a similarly large negative coefficient on a correlated variable. Hence, the model will have a tendency for high variance due to this wiggle room of the coefficients that increases the risk that the model overfits...