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

Engineering alpha factors that predict returns

Based on a conceptual understanding of key factor categories, their rationale, and popular metrics, a key task is to identify new factors that may better capture the risks embodied by the return drivers laid out previously, or to find new ones. In either case, it will be important to compare the performance of innovative factors to that of known factors to identify incremental signal gains.

Key tools that facilitate the transformation of data into factors include the Python libraries for numerical computing, NumPy and pandas, as well as the Python wrapper around the specialized library for technical analysis, TA-Lib. Alternatives include the expression alphas developed in Zura Kakushadze's 2016 paper, 101 Formulaic Alphas, and implemented by the alphatools library. In addition, the Quantopian platform provides a large number of built-in factors to speed up the research process.

To apply one or more factors to an investment...