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

The alternative data revolution

The data deluge driven by digitization, networking, and plummeting storage costs has led to profound qualitative changes in the nature of information available for predictive analytics, often summarized by the five Vs:

  • Volume: The amount of data generated, collected, and stored is orders of magnitude larger as the byproduct of online and offline activity, transactions, records, and other sources. Volumes continue to grow with the capacity for analysis and storage.
  • Velocity: Data is generated, transferred, and processed to become available near, or at, real-time speed.
  • Variety: Data is organized in formats no longer limited to structured, tabular forms, such as CSV files or relational database tables. Instead, new sources produce semi-structured formats, such as JSON or HTML, and unstructured content, including raw text, "images"? and audio or video data, adding new challenges to render data suitable for ML...