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

Separating signal from noise with Alphalens

Quantopian has open sourced the Python Alphalens library for the performance analysis of predictive stock factors. It integrates well with the Zipline backtesting library and the portfolio performance and risk analysis library pyfolio, which we will explore in the next chapter.

Alphalens facilitates the analysis of the predictive power of alpha factors concerning the:

  • Correlation of the signals with subsequent returns
  • Profitability of an equal or factor-weighted portfolio based on a (subset of) the signals
  • Turnover of factors to indicate the potential trading costs
  • Factor performance during specific events
  • Breakdowns of the preceding by sector

The analysis can be conducted using tearsheets or individual computations and plots. The tearsheets are illustrated in the online repository to save some space.

Creating forward returns and factor quantiles

To utilize Alphalens, we need...