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

Deep Reinforcement Learning – Building a Trading Agent

In this chapter, we'll introduce reinforcement learning (RL), which takes a different approach to machine learning (ML) than the supervised and unsupervised algorithms we have covered so far. RL has attracted enormous attention as it has been the main driver behind some of the most exciting AI breakthroughs, like AlphaGo. David Silver, AlphaGo's creator and the lead RL researcher at Google-owned DeepMind, recently won the prestigious 2019 ACM Prize in Computing "for breakthrough advances in computer game-playing." We will see that the interactive and online nature of RL makes it particularly well-suited to the trading and investment domain.

RL models goal-directed learning by an agent that interacts with a typically stochastic environment that the agent has incomplete information about. RL aims to automate how the agent makes decisions to achieve a long-term objective by...