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

Backtesting pitfalls and how to avoid them

Backtesting simulates an algorithmic strategy based on historical data, with the goal of producing performance results that generalize to new market conditions. In addition to the generic uncertainty around predictions in the context of ever-changing markets, several implementation aspects can bias the results and increase the risk of mistaking in-sample performance for patterns that will hold out-of-sample.

These aspects are under our control and include the selection and preparation of data, unrealistic assumptions about the trading environment, and the flawed application and interpretation of statistical tests. The risks of false backtest discoveries multiply with increasing computing power, bigger datasets, and more complex algorithms that facilitate the misidentification of apparent signals in a noisy sample.

In this section, we will outline the most serious and common methodological mistakes. Please refer to the literature on...