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

Cointegration – time series with a shared trend

We briefly mentioned cointegration in the previous section on multivariate time-series models. Let's now explain this concept and how to diagnose its presence in more detail before leveraging it for a statistical arbitrage trading strategy.

We have seen how a time series can have a unit root that creates a stochastic trend and makes the time series highly persistent. When we use such an integrated time series in their original, rather than in differenced, form as a feature in a linear regression model, its relationship with the outcome will often appear statistically significant, even though it is not. This phenomenon is called spurious regression (for details, see Chapter 18, CNNs for Financial Time Series and Satellite Images, in Wooldridge, 2008). Therefore, the recommended solution is to difference the time series so they become stationary before using them in a model.

However, there is an exception when there...