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

Optimizing an NN for a long-short strategy

In practice, we need to explore variations for the design options for the NN architecture and how we train it from those we outlined previously because we can never be sure from the outset which configuration best suits the data. In this section, we will explore various architectures for a simple feedforward NN to predict daily stock returns using the dataset developed in Chapter 12 (see the notebook preparing_the_model_data in the GitHub directory for that chapter).

To this end, we will define a function that returns a TensorFlow model based on several architectural input parameters and cross-validate alternative designs using the MultipleTimeSeriesCV we introduced in Chapter 7, Linear Models – From Risk Factors to Return Forecasts. To assess the signal quality of the model predictions, we build a simple ranking-based long-short strategy based on an ensemble of the models that perform best during the in-sample cross-validation...