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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored linear time-series models for the univariate case of individual series, as well as multivariate models for several interacting series. We encountered applications that predict macro fundamentals, models that forecast asset or portfolio volatility with widespread use in risk management, and multivariate VAR models that capture the dynamics of multiple macro series. We also looked at the concept of cointegration, which underpins the popular pair-trading strategy.

Similar to Chapter 7, Linear Models – From Risk Factors to Return Forecasts, we saw how linear models impose a lot of structure, that is, they make strong assumptions that potentially require transformations and extensive testing to verify that these assumptions are met. If they are, model-training and interpretation are straightforward, and the models provide a good baseline that more complex models may be able to improve on. In the next two chapters, we will see two examples...