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

Alternative Data for Finance – Categories and Use Cases

The previous chapter covered working with market and fundamental data, which have been the traditional drivers of trading strategies. In this chapter, we'll fast-forward to the recent emergence of a broad range of much more diverse data sources as fuel for discretionary and algorithmic strategies. Their heterogeneity and novelty have inspired the label of alternative data and created a rapidly growing provider and service industry.

Behind this trend is a familiar story: propelled by the explosive growth of the internet and mobile networks, digital data continues to grow exponentially amid advances in the technology to process, store, and analyze new data sources. The exponential growth in the availability of and ability to manage more diverse digital data, in turn, has been a critical force behind the dramatic performance improvements of machine learning (ML) that are driving innovation across industries...