Book Image

Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading - Second Edition

By : Stefan Jansen
Book Image

Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading - Second Edition

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 revised and expanded second edition enables you to build and evaluate sophisticated supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models. This book introduces end-to-end machine learning for the trading workflow, from the idea and feature engineering to model optimization, strategy design, and backtesting. It illustrates this by using examples ranging from linear models and tree-based ensembles to deep-learning techniques from cutting edge research. This edition shows how to work with market, fundamental, and alternative data, such as tick data, minute and daily bars, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, financial news, or satellite images to generate tradeable signals. It illustrates how to engineer financial features or alpha factors that enable an ML model to predict returns from price data for US and international stocks and ETFs. It also shows how to assess the signal content of new features using Alphalens and SHAP values and includes a new appendix with over one hundred alpha factor examples. By the end, you will be proficient in translating ML model predictions into a trading strategy that operates at daily or intraday horizons, and in evaluating its performance.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
24
References
25
Index

Designing and executing an ML-driven strategy

In this book, we demonstrate how ML fits into the overall process of designing, executing, and evaluating a trading strategy. To this end, we'll assume that an ML-based strategy is driven by data sources that contain predictive signals for the target universe and strategy, which, after suitable preprocessing and feature engineering, permit an ML model to predict asset returns or other strategy inputs. The model predictions, in turn, translate into buy or sell orders based on human discretion or automated rules, which in turn may be manually encoded or learned by another ML algorithm in an end-to-end approach.

Figure 1.1 depicts the key steps in this workflow, which also shapes the organization of this book:

Figure 1.1: The ML4T workflow

Part 1 introduces important skills and techniques that apply across different strategies and ML use cases. These include the following:

  • How to source and manage important...