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)

Recurrent neural networks for time series forecasting

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a special type of neural network designed to work with sequential data. They are popular for time series forecasting as well as for solving NLP problems such as machine translation, text generation, and speech recognition. There are numerous extensions of the RNNs, such as Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) networks, which are currently part of some of the state-of-the-art architectures. However, it is good to be familiar with the original vanilla RNN. The following diagram presents the typical RNN schema:

One of the main differences between the feedforward networks and RNNs is that the former take a fixed size input at once to produce a fixed size output. On the other hand, RNNs do not take all the input data at once – they ingest the data sequentially...