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

backtrader – a flexible tool for local backtests

backtrader is a popular, flexible, and user-friendly Python library for local backtests with great documentation, developed since 2015 by Daniel Rodriguez. In addition to a large and active community of individual traders, there are several banks and trading houses that use backtrader to prototype and test new strategies before porting them to a production-ready platform using, for example, Java. You can also use backtrader for live trading with several brokers of your choice (see the backtrader documentation and Chapter 23, Conclusions and Next Steps).

We'll first summarize the key concepts of backtrader to clarify the big picture of the backtesting workflow on this platform, and then demonstrate its usage for a strategy driven by ML predictions.

Key concepts of backtrader's Cerebro architecture

backtrader's Cerebro (Spanish for "brain") architecture represents the key components of the backtesting...