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

Linear classification

The linear regression model discussed so far assumes a quantitative response variable. In this section, we will focus on approaches to modeling qualitative output variables for inference and prediction, a process that is known as classification and that occurs even more frequently than regression in practice.

Predicting a qualitative response for a data point is called classifying that observation because it involves assigning the observation to a category, or class. In practice, classification methods often predict probabilities for each of the categories of a qualitative variable and then use this probability to decide on the proper classification.

We could approach this classification problem by ignoring the fact that the output variable assumes discrete values, and then applying the linear regression model to try to predict a categorical output using multiple input variables. However, it is easy to construct examples where this method performs very...