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

PCA for trading

PCA is useful for algorithmic trading in several respects, including:

  • The data-driven derivation of risk factors by applying PCA to asset returns
  • The construction of uncorrelated portfolios based on the principal components of the correlation matrix of asset returns

We will illustrate both of these applications in this section.

Data-driven risk factors

In Chapter 7, Linear Models – From Risk Factors to Return Forecasts, we explored risk factor models used in quantitative finance to capture the main drivers of returns. These models explain differences in returns on assets based on their exposure to systematic risk factors and the rewards associated with these factors. In particular, we explored the Fama-French approach, which specifies factors based on prior knowledge about the empirical behavior of average returns, treats these factors as observable, and then estimates risk model coefficients using linear regression...