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

Random forests – making trees more reliable

Decision trees are not only useful for their transparency and interpretability. They are also fundamental building blocks for more powerful ensemble models that combine many individual trees, while randomly varying their design to address the overfitting problems we just discussed.

Why ensemble models perform better

Ensemble learning involves combining several machine learning models into a single new model that aims to make better predictions than any individual model. More specifically, an ensemble integrates the predictions of several base estimators, trained using one or more learning algorithms, to reduce the generalization error that these models produce on their own.

For ensemble learning to achieve this goal, the individual models must be:

  • Accurate: Outperform a naive baseline (such as the sample mean or class proportions)
  • Independent: Predictions are generated differently to produce different...