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

Deep learning – what's new and why it matters

The machine learning (ML) algorithms covered in Part 2 work well on a wide variety of important problems, including on text data, as demonstrated in Part 3. They have been less successful, however, in solving central AI problems such as recognizing speech or classifying objects in images. These limitations have motivated the development of DL, and the recent DL breakthroughs have greatly contributed to a resurgence of interest in AI. For a comprehensive introduction that includes and expands on many of the points in this section, see Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville (2016), or for a much shorter version, see LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton (2015).

In this section, we outline how DL overcomes many of the limitations of other ML algorithms. These limitations particularly constrain performance on high-dimensional and unstructured data that requires sophisticated efforts to extract informative features.

The ML techniques...