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

A conditional autoencoder for trading

Recent research by Gu, Kelly, and Xiu (GKX, 2019) developed an asset pricing model based on the exposure of securities to risk factors. It builds on the concept of data-driven risk factors that we discussed in Chapter 13, Data-Driven Risk Factors and Asset Allocation with Unsupervised Learning, when introducing PCA as well as the risk factor models covered in Chapter 4, Financial Feature Engineering – How to Research Alpha Factors. They aim to show that the asset characteristics used by factor models to capture the systematic drivers of "anomalies" are just proxies for the time-varying exposure to risk factors that cannot be directly measured. In this context, anomalies are returns in excess of those explained by the exposure to aggregate market risk (see the discussion of the capital asset pricing model in Chapter 5, Portfolio Optimization and Performance Evaluation).

The Fama-French factor models discussed in Chapter 4 and...