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

How to predict returns with linear regression

In this section, we will use linear regression with and without shrinkage to predict returns and generate trading signals.

First, we need to create the model inputs and outputs. To this end, we'll create features along the lines we discussed in Chapter 4, Financial Feature Engineering – How to Research Alpha Factors, as well as forward returns for various time horizons, which we will use as outcomes for the models.

Then, we will apply the linear regression models discussed in the previous section to illustrate their usage with statsmodels and sklearn and evaluate their predictive performance. In the next chapter, we will use the results to develop a trading strategy and demonstrate the end-to-end process of backtesting a strategy driven by a machine learning model.

Preparing model features and forward returns

To prepare the data for our predictive model, we need to:

  • Select a universe of equities and...