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

How to solve reinforcement learning problems

RL methods aim to learn from experience how to take actions that achieve a long-term goal. To this end, the agent and the environment interact over a sequence of discrete time steps via the interface of actions, state observations, and rewards described in the previous section.

Key challenges in solving RL problems

Solving RL problems requires addressing two unique challenges: the credit-assignment problem and the exploration-exploitation trade-off.

Credit assignment

In RL, reward signals can occur significantly later than actions that contributed to the result, complicating the association of actions with their consequences. For example, when an agent takes 100 different positions and trades repeatedly, how does it realize that certain holdings performed much better than others if it only learns about the portfolio return?

The credit-assignment problem is the challenge of accurately estimating the benefits and costs...