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

Bayesian ML – Dynamic Sharpe Ratios and Pairs Trading

In this chapter, we will introduce Bayesian approaches to machine learning (ML) and how their different perspective on uncertainty adds value when developing and evaluating trading strategies.

Bayesian statistics allows us to quantify uncertainty about future events and refine our estimates in a principled way as new information arrives. This dynamic approach adapts well to the evolving nature of financial markets. It is particularly useful when there are fewer relevant data and we require methods that systematically integrate prior knowledge or assumptions.

We will see that Bayesian approaches to machine learning allow for richer insights into the uncertainty around statistical metrics, parameter estimates, and predictions. The applications range from more granular risk management to dynamic updates of predictive models that incorporate changes in the market environment. The Black-Litterman approach to asset...