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

Data-Driven Risk Factors and Asset Allocation with Unsupervised Learning

Chapter 6, The Machine Learning Process, introduced how unsupervised learning adds value by uncovering structures in data without the need for an outcome variable to guide the search process. This contrasts with supervised learning, which was the focus of the last several chapters: instead of predicting future outcomes, unsupervised learning aims to learn an informative representation of the data that helps explore new data, discover useful insights, or solve some other task more effectively.

Dimensionality reduction and clustering are the main tasks for unsupervised learning:

  • Dimensionality reduction transforms the existing features into a new, smaller set while minimizing the loss of information. Algorithms differ by how they measure the loss of information, whether they apply linear or nonlinear transformations or which constraints they impose on the new feature set.
  • Clustering algorithms...