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

Regularizing linear regression using shrinkage

The least-squares method to train a linear regression model will produce the best linear and unbiased coefficient estimates when the Gauss–Markov assumptions are met. Variations like GLS fare similarly well, even when OLS assumptions about the error covariance matrix are violated. However, there are estimators that produce biased coefficients to reduce the variance and achieve a lower generalization error overall (Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman 2009).

When a linear regression model contains many correlated variables, their coefficients will be poorly determined. This is because the effect of a large positive coefficient on the RSS can be canceled by a similarly large negative coefficient on a correlated variable. As a result, the risk of prediction errors due to high variance increases because this wiggle room for the coefficients makes the model more likely to overfit to the sample.

How to hedge against overfitting...