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

Hierarchical clustering for optimal portfolios

In Chapter 5, Portfolio Optimization and Performance Evaluation, we discussed several methods that aim to choose portfolio weights for a given set of assets to optimize the risk and return profile of the resulting portfolio. These included the mean-variance optimization of Markowitz's modern portfolio theory, the Kelly criterion, and risk parity. In this section, we cover hierarchical risk parity (HRP), a more recent innovation (Prado 2016) that leverages hierarchical clustering to assign position sizes to assets based on the risk characteristics of subgroups.

We will first present how HRP works and then compare its performance against alternatives using a long-only strategy driven by the gradient boosting models we developed in the last chapter.

How hierarchical risk parity works

The key ideas of hierarchical risk parity are to do the following:

  • Use hierarchical clustering of the covariance matrix to group...