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

From signals to trades – Zipline for backtests

The open source library Zipline is an event-driven backtesting system. It generates market events to simulate the reactions of an algorithmic trading strategy and tracks its performance. A particularly important feature is that it provides the algorithm with historical point-in-time data that avoids look-ahead bias.

The library has been popularized by the crowd-sourced quantitative investment fund Quantopian, which uses it in production to facilitate algorithm development and live-trading.

In this section, we'll provide a brief demonstration of its basic functionality. Chapter 8, The ML4T Workflow – From Model to Strategy Backtesting, contains a more detailed introduction to prepare us for more complex use cases.

How to backtest a single-factor strategy

You can use Zipline offline in conjunction with data bundles to research and evaluate alpha factors. When using it on the Quantopian platform, you will...