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

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced new sources of alternative data made available as a result of the big data revolution, including individuals, business processes, and sensors, such as satellites or GPS location devices. We presented a framework to evaluate alternative datasets from an investment perspective and laid out key categories and providers to help you navigate this vast and quickly expanding area that provides critical inputs for algorithmic trading strategies that use ML.

We also explored powerful Python tools you can use to collect your own datasets at scale. We did this so that you can potentially work on getting your private informational edge as an algorithmic trader using web scraping.

We will now proceed, in the following chapter, to the design and evaluation of alpha factors that produce trading signals and look at how to combine them in a portfolio context.