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 presented the specialized RNN architecture that is tailored to sequential data. We covered how RNNs work, analyzed the computational graph, and saw how RNNs enable parameter-sharing over numerous steps to capture long-range dependencies that FFNNs and CNNs are not well suited for.

We also reviewed the challenges of vanishing and exploding gradients and saw how gated units like long short-term memory cells enable RNNs to learn dependencies over hundreds of time steps. Finally, we applied RNNs to challenges common in algorithmic trading, such as predicting univariate and multivariate time series and sentiment analysis using SEC filings.

In the next chapter, we will introduce unsupervised deep learning techniques like autoencoders and generative adversarial networks and their applications to investment and trading strategies.