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)

Analytical tools for diagnostics and feature extraction

Time series data is a sequence of values separated by discrete time intervals that are typically even-spaced (except for missing values). A time series is often modeled as a stochastic process consisting of a collection of random variables, y(t1), ..., y(tT), with one variable for each point in time, ti , i=1, ..., T. A univariate time series consists of a single value, y, at each point in time, whereas a multivariate time series consists of several observations that can be represented by a vector.

The number of periods, Δt= ti - tj, between distinct points in time, ti, tj, is called lag, with T-1 lags for each time series. Just as relationships between different variables at a given point in time is key for cross-sectional models, relationships between data points separated by a given lag are fundamental to analyzing...