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

Solving dynamic programming problems

Finite MDPs are a simple yet fundamental framework. We will introduce the trajectories of rewards that the agent aims to optimize, define the policy and value functions used to formulate the optimization problem, and the Bellman equations that form the basis for the solution methods.

Finite Markov decision problems

MDPs frame the agent-environment interaction as a sequential decision problem over a series of time steps t =1, …, T that constitute an episode. Time steps are assumed as discrete, but the framework can be extended to continuous time.

The abstraction afforded by MDPs makes its application easily adaptable to many contexts. The time steps can be at arbitrary intervals, and actions and states can take any form that can be expressed numerically.

The Markov property implies that the current state completely describes the process, that is, the process has no memory. Information from past states adds no value when trying...