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

Conclusions and Next Steps

Our goal for this book was to enable you to apply machine learning (ML) to a variety of data sources and extract signals that add value to a trading strategy. To this end, we took a more comprehensive view of the investment process, from idea generation to strategy evaluation, and introduced ML as an important element of this process in the form of the ML4T workflow.

While demonstrating the use of a broad range of ML algorithms, from the fundamental to the advanced, we saw how ML can add value at multiple steps in the process of designing, testing, and executing a strategy. For the most part, however, we focused on the core ML value proposition, which consists of the ability to extract actionable information from much larger amounts of data more systematically than human experts would ever be able to.

This value proposition has really gained currency with the explosion of digital data that made it both more promising and necessary...