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 CNNs learn to model grid-like data

CNNs are conceptually similar to feedforward neural networks (NNs): they consist of units with parameters called weights and biases, and the training process adjusts these parameters to optimize the network's output for a given input according to a loss function. They are most commonly used for classification. Each unit uses its parameters to apply a linear operation to the input data or activations received from other units, typically followed by a nonlinear transformation.

The overall network models a differentiable function that maps raw data, such as image pixels, to class probabilities using an output activation function like softmax. CNNs use an objective function such as cross-entropy loss to measure the quality of the output with a single metric. They also rely on the gradients of the loss with respect to the network parameter to learn via backpropagation.

Feedforward NNs with fully connected layers do not scale well to high...