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

How word embeddings encode semantics

The bag-of-words model represents documents as sparse, high-dimensional vectors that reflect the tokens they contain. Word embeddings represent tokens as dense, lower-dimensional vectors so that the relative location of words reflects how they are used in context. They embody the distributional hypothesis from linguistics that claims words are best defined by the company they keep.

Word vectors are capable of capturing numerous semantic aspects; not only are synonyms assigned nearby embeddings, but words can have multiple degrees of similarity. For example, the word "driver" could be similar to "motorist" or to "factor." Furthermore, embeddings encode relationships among pairs of words like analogies (Tokyo is to Japan what Paris is to France, or went is to go what saw is to see), as we will illustrate later in this section.

Embeddings result from training a neural network to predict words from their context...