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 RL for trading with the OpenAI Gym

In the previous section, we saw how Q-learning allows us to learn the optimal state-action value function q* in an environment with discrete states and discrete actions using iterative updates based on the Bellman equation.

In this section, we will take RL one step closer to the real world and upgrade the algorithm to continuous states (while keeping actions discrete). This implies that we can no longer use a tabular solution that simply fills an array with state-action values. Instead, we will see how to approximate q* using a neural network (NN), which results in a deep Q-network. We will first discuss how deep learning integrates with RL before presenting the deep Q-learning algorithm, as well as various refinements that accelerate its convergence and make it more robust.

Continuous states also imply a more complex environment. We will demonstrate how to work with OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for designing and comparing RL algorithms. First...