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 ML4T Workflow – From Model to Strategy Backtesting

Now, it's time to integrate the various building blocks of the machine learning for trading (ML4T) workflow that we have so far discussed separately. The goal of this chapter is to present an end-to-end perspective of the process of designing, simulating, and evaluating a trading strategy driven by an ML algorithm. To this end, we will demonstrate in more detail how to backtest an ML-driven strategy in a historical market context using the Python libraries backtrader and Zipline.

The ultimate objective of the ML4T workflow is to gather evidence from historical data. This helps us decide whether to deploy a candidate strategy in a live market and put financial resources at risk. This process builds on the skills you developed in the previous chapters because it relies on your ability to:

  • Work with a diverse set of data sources to engineer informative factors
  • Design ML models that generate predictive...