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 workflow

Developing an ML solution for an algorithmic trading strategy requires a systematic approach to maximize the chances of success while economizing on resources. It is also very important to make the process transparent and replicable in order to facilitate collaboration, maintenance, and later refinements.

The following chart outlines the key steps, from problem definition to the deployment of a predictive solution:

Figure 6.1: Key steps of the machine learning workflow

The process is iterative throughout, and the effort required at different stages will vary according to the project. Generally, however, this process should include the following steps:

  1. Frame the problem, identify a target metric, and define success.
  2. Source, clean, and validate the data.
  3. Understand your data and generate informative features.
  4. Pick one or more machine learning algorithms suitable for your data.
  5. Train, test, and tune...