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 baseline model – multiple linear regression

We will begin with the model's specification and objective function, the methods we can use to learn its parameters, and the statistical assumptions that allow the inference and diagnostics of these assumptions. Then, we will present extensions that we can use to adapt the model to situations that violate these assumptions. Useful references for additional background include Wooldridge (2002 and 2008).

How to formulate the model

The multiple regression model defines a linear functional relationship between one continuous outcome variable and p input variables that can be of any type but may require preprocessing. Multivariate regression, in contrast, refers to the regression of multiple outputs on multiple input variables.

In the population, the linear regression model has the following form for a single instance of the output y, an input vector , and the error :

The interpretation of the coefficients...