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

Modeling topics discussed in earnings calls

In Chapter 3, Alternative Data for Finance – Categories and Use Cases, we learned how to scrape earnings call data from the SeekingAlpha site. In this section, we will illustrate topic modeling using this source. I'm using a sample of some 700 earnings call transcripts between 2018 and 2019. This is a fairly small dataset; for a practical application, we would need a larger dataset.

The directory earnings_calls contains several files with the code examples used in this section. Refer to the notebook lda_earnings_calls for details on loading, exploring, and preprocessing the data, as well as training and evaluating individual models, and the run_experiments.py file for the experiments described next.

Data preprocessing

The transcripts consist of individual statements by company representatives, an operator, and a Q&A session with analysts. We will treat each of these statements as separate documents, ignoring operator...