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

Creating synthetic data with GANs

This book mostly focuses on supervised learning algorithms that receive input data and predict an outcome, which we can compare to the ground truth to evaluate their performance. Such algorithms are also called discriminative models because they learn to differentiate between different output values.

GANs are an instance of generative models like the variational autoencoder we encountered in the previous chapter. As described there, a generative model takes a training set with samples drawn from some distribution pdata and learns to represent an estimate pmodel of that data-generating distribution.

As mentioned in the introduction, GANs are considered one of the most exciting recent machine learning innovations because they appear capable of generating high-quality samples that faithfully mimic a range of input data. This is very attractive given the absence or high cost of labeled data required for supervised learning.

GANs have triggered...