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

Gradient boosting – ensembles for most tasks

AdaBoost can also be interpreted as a stagewise forward approach to minimizing an exponential loss function for a binary outcome, y , that identifies a new base learner, hm, at each iteration, m, with the corresponding weight,, and adds it to the ensemble, as shown in the following formula:

This interpretation of AdaBoost as a gradient descent algorithm that minimizes a particular loss function, namely exponential loss, was only discovered several years after its original publication.

Gradient boosting leverages this insight and applies the boosting method to a much wider range of loss functions. The method enables the design of machine learning algorithms to solve any regression, classification, or ranking problem, as long as it can be formulated using a loss function that is differentiable and thus has a gradient. Common example loss functions for different tasks include:

  • Regression: The mean-squared...