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 a backtesting engine works

Put simply, a backtesting engine iterates over historical prices (and other data), passes the current values to your algorithm, receives orders in return, and keeps track of the resulting positions and their value.

In practice, there are numerous requirements for creating a realistic and robust simulation of the ML4T workflow that was depicted in Figure 8.1 at the beginning of this chapter. The difference between vectorized and event-driven approaches illustrates how the faithful reproduction of the actual trading environment adds significant complexity.

Vectorized versus event-driven backtesting

A vectorized backtest is the most basic way to evaluate a strategy. It simply multiplies a signal vector that represents the target position size with a vector of returns for the investment horizon to compute the period performance.

Let's illustrate the vectorized approach using the daily return predictions that we created using ridge...