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

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the challenge of learning from data and looked at supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement models as the principal forms of learning that we will study in this book to build algorithmic trading strategies. We discussed the need for supervised learning algorithms to make assumptions about the functional relationships that they attempt to learn. They do this to limit the search space while incurring an inductive bias that may lead to excessive generalization errors.

We presented key aspects of the machine learning workflow, introduced the most common error metrics for regression and classification models, explained the bias-variance trade-off, and illustrated the various tools for managing the model selection process using cross-validation.

In the following chapter, we will dive into linear models for regression and classification to develop our first algorithmic trading strategies that use machine learning.