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

Dimensionality reduction

In linear algebra terms, the features of a dataset create a vector space whose dimensionality corresponds to the number of linearly independent rows or columns, whichever is larger. Two columns are linearly dependent when they are perfectly correlated so that one can be computed from the other using the linear operations of addition and multiplication.

In other words, they are parallel vectors that represent the same direction rather than different ones in the data and thus only constitute a single dimension. Similarly, if one variable is a linear combination of several others, then it is an element of the vector space created by those columns and does not add a new dimension of its own.

The number of dimensions of a dataset matters because each new dimension can add a signal concerning an outcome. However, there is also a downside known as the curse of dimensionality: as the number of independent features grows while the number of observations...