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

Time-Series Models for Volatility Forecasts and Statistical Arbitrage

In Chapter 7, Linear Models – From Risk Factors to Asset Return Forecasts, we introduced linear models for inference and prediction, starting with static models for a contemporaneous relationship with cross-sectional inputs that have an immediate effect on the output. We presented the ordinary least squares (OLS) learning algorithm, and saw that it produces unbiased coefficients for a correctly specified model with residuals that are not correlated with the input variables. Adding the assumption that the residuals have constant variance guarantees that OLS produces the smallest mean squared prediction error among unbiased estimators.

We also encountered panel data that had both cross-sectional and time-series dimensions, when we learned how the Fama-Macbeth regressions estimate the value of risk factors over time and across assets. However, the relationship between returns across time is typically fairly...