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 Machine Learning Process

This chapter starts Part 2 of this book, where we'll illustrate how you can use a range of supervised and unsupervised machine learning (ML) models for trading. We will explain each model's assumptions and use cases before we demonstrate relevant applications using various Python libraries. The categories of models that we will cover in Parts 2-4 include:

  • Linear models for the regression and classification of cross-section, time series, and panel data
  • Generalized additive models, including nonlinear tree-based models, such as decision trees
  • Ensemble models, including random forest and gradient-boosting machines
  • Unsupervised linear and nonlinear methods for dimensionality reduction and clustering
  • Neural network models, including recurrent and convolutional architectures
  • Reinforcement learning models

We will apply these models to the market, fundamental, and alternative data sources...