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

Clustering

Both clustering and dimensionality reduction summarize the data. As we have just discussed, dimensionality reduction compresses the data by representing it using new, fewer features that capture the most relevant information. Clustering algorithms, in contrast, assign existing observations to subgroups that consist of similar data points.

Clustering can serve to better understand the data through the lens of categories learned from continuous variables. It also permits you to automatically categorize new objects according to the learned criteria. Examples of related applications include hierarchical taxonomies, medical diagnostics, and customer segmentation. Alternatively, clusters can be used to represent groups as prototypes, using, for example, the midpoint of a cluster as the best representatives of learned grouping. An example application includes image compression.

Clustering algorithms differ with respect to their strategy of identifying groupings:

    ...