Book Image

Python for Finance Cookbook

By : Eryk Lewinson
Book Image

Python for Finance Cookbook

By: Eryk Lewinson

Overview of this book

Python is one of the most popular programming languages used in the financial industry, with a huge set of accompanying libraries. In this book, you'll cover different ways of downloading financial data and preparing it for modeling. You'll calculate popular indicators used in technical analysis, such as Bollinger Bands, MACD, RSI, and backtest automatic trading strategies. Next, you'll cover time series analysis and models, such as exponential smoothing, ARIMA, and GARCH (including multivariate specifications), before exploring the popular CAPM and the Fama-French three-factor model. You'll then discover how to optimize asset allocation and use Monte Carlo simulations for tasks such as calculating the price of American options and estimating the Value at Risk (VaR). In later chapters, you'll work through an entire data science project in the financial domain. You'll also learn how to solve the credit card fraud and default problems using advanced classifiers such as random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and stacked models. You'll then be able to tune the hyperparameters of the models and handle class imbalance. Finally, you'll focus on learning how to use deep learning (PyTorch) for approaching financial tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to effectively analyze financial data using a recipe-based approach.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Financial Data and Preprocessing

The first chapter of this book is dedicated to a very important (if not the most important) part of any data science/quantitative finance project—gathering and working with data. In line with the "garbage in, garbage out" maxim, we should strive to have data of the highest possible quality, and correctly preprocess it for later use with statistical and machine learning algorithms. The reason for this is simple—the results of our analyses highly depend on the input data, and no sophisticated model will be able to compensate for that.

In this chapter, we cover the entire process of gathering financial data and preprocessing it into the form that is most commonly used in real-life projects. We begin by presenting a few possible sources of high-quality data, show how to convert prices into returns (which have properties desired...