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

Latent Dirichlet allocation

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) extends pLSA by adding a generative process for topics (Blei, Ng, and Jordan 2003). It is the most popular topic model because it tends to produce meaningful topics that humans can relate to, can assign topics to new documents, and is extensible. Variants of LDA models can include metadata, like authors or image data, or learn hierarchical topics.

How LDA works

LDA is a hierarchical Bayesian model that assumes topics are probability distributions over words, and documents are distributions over topics. More specifically, the model assumes that topics follow a sparse Dirichlet distribution, which implies that documents reflect only a small set of topics, and topics use only a limited number of terms frequently.

The Dirichlet distribution

The Dirichlet distribution produces probability vectors that can be used as a discrete probability distribution. That is, it randomly generates a given number of values that...