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

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced DL as a form of representation learning that extracts hierarchical features from high-dimensional, unstructured data. We saw how to design, train, and regularize feedforward neural networks using NumPy. We demonstrated how to use the popular DL libraries PyTorch and TensorFlow that are suitable for use cases from rapid prototyping to production deployments.

Most importantly, we designed and tuned an NN using TensorFlow and were able to generate tradeable signals that delivered attractive returns during both the in-sample and out-of-sample periods.

In the next chapter, we will explore CNNs, which are particularly well suited for image data but are also well-suited for sequential data.