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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored numerous techniques and options to process unstructured data with the goal of extracting semantically meaningful numerical features for use in ML models.

We covered the basic tokenization and annotation pipeline and illustrated its implementation for multiple languages using spaCy and TextBlob. We built on these results to build a document model based on the bag-of-words model to represent documents as numerical vectors. We learned how to refine the preprocessing pipeline and then used the vectorized text data for classification and sentiment analysis.

We have two more chapters on alternative text data. In the next chapter, we will learn how to summarize texts using unsupervised learning to identify latent topics. Then, in Chapter 16, Word Embeddings for Earnings Calls and SEC Filings, we will learn how to represent words as vectors that reflect the context of word usage, a technique that has been used very successfully to provide richer...