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

Elements of a reinforcement learning system

RL problems feature several elements that set them apart from the ML settings we have covered so far. The following two sections outline the key features required for defining and solving an RL problem by learning a policy that automates decisions. We'll use the notation and generally follow Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (Sutton and Barto 2018) and David Silver's UCL Courses on RL (https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/), which are recommended for further study beyond the brief summary that the scope of this chapter permits.

RL problems aim to solve for actions that optimize the agent's objective, given some observations about the environment. The environment presents information about its state to the agent, assigns rewards for actions, and transitions the agent to new states, subject to probability distributions the agent may or may not know. It may be fully or partially observable, and it may also contain...