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)

Probabilistic programming with PyMC3

Probabilistic programming provides a language to describe and fit probability distributions so that we can design, encode, and automatically estimate and evaluate complex models. It aims to abstract away some of the computational and analytical complexity to allow us to focus on the conceptually more straightforward and intuitive aspects of Bayesian reasoning and inference.

The field has become quite dynamic since new languages emerged. Uber open sourced Pyro (based on PyTorch) and Google recently added a probability module to TensorFlow (see the resources linked on GitHub).

As a result, the practical relevance and use of Bayesian methods in machine learning will likely increase to generate insights into uncertainty and for use cases that require transparent rather than black-box models in particular.

In this section, we will introduce the...