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 recurrent neural nets work

RNNs assume that the input data has been generated as a sequence such that previous data points impact the current observation and are relevant for predicting subsequent values. Thus, they allow more complex input-output relationships than FFNNs and CNNs, which are designed to map one input vector to one output vector using a given number of computational steps. RNNs, in contrast, can model data for tasks where the input, the output, or both, are best represented as a sequence of vectors. For a good overview, refer to Chapter 10 in Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville (2016).

The diagram in Figure 19.1, inspired by Andrew Karpathy's 2015 blog post The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (see GitHub for a link), illustrates mappings from input to output vectors using nonlinear transformations carried out by one or more neural network layers:

Figure 19.1: Various types of sequence-to-sequence models

The left panel...