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

New frontiers – pretrained transformer models

Word2vec and GloVe embeddings capture more semantic information than the bag-of-words approach. However, they allow only a single fixed-length representation of each token that does not differentiate between context-specific usages. To address unsolved problems such as multiple meanings for the same word, called polysemy, several new models have emerged that build on the attention mechanism designed to learn more contextualized word embeddings (Vaswani et al., 2017). The key characteristics of these models are as follows:

  • The use of bidirectional language models that process text both left-to-right and right-to-left for a richer context representation
  • The use of semi-supervised pretraining on a large generic corpus to learn universal language aspects in the form of embeddings and network weights that can be used and fine-tuned for specific tasks (a form of transfer learning that we will discuss in more detail in...