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

Boosting Your Trading Strategy

In the previous chapter, we saw how random forests improve on the predictions of a decision tree by combining many trees into an ensemble. The key to reducing the high variance of an individual tree is the use of bagging, short for bootstrap aggregation, which introduces randomness into the process of growing individual trees. More specifically, bagging samples from the data with replacements so that each tree is trained on a different but equal-sized random subset, with some observations repeating. In addition, a random forest randomly selects a subset of the features so that both the rows and the columns of the training set for each tree are random versions of the original data. The ensemble then generates predictions by averaging over the outputs of the individual trees.

Individual random forest trees are usually grown deep to ensure low bias while relying on the randomized training process to produce different, uncorrelated prediction errors...