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

Text Data for Trading – Sentiment Analysis

This is the first of three chapters dedicated to extracting signals for algorithmic trading strategies from text data using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML).

Text data is very rich in content but highly unstructured, so it requires more preprocessing to enable an ML algorithm to extract relevant information. A key challenge consists of converting text into a numerical format without losing its meaning. We will cover several techniques capable of capturing the nuances of language so that they can be used as input for ML algorithms.

In this chapter, we will introduce fundamental feature extraction techniques that focus on individual semantic units, that is, words or short groups of words called tokens. We will show how to represent documents as vectors of token counts by creating a document-term matrix and then proceed to use it as input for news classification and sentiment analysis. We will also...