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

WorldQuant's quest for formulaic alphas

We introduced WorldQuant in Chapter 1, Machine Learning for Trading – From Idea to Execution, as part of a trend toward crowd-sourcing investment strategies. WorldQuant maintains a virtual research center where quants worldwide compete to identify alphas. These alphas are trading signals in the form of computational expressions that help predict price movements, just like the common factors described in the previous section.

These formulaic alphas translate the mechanism to extract the signal from data into code, and they can be developed and tested individually with the goal to integrate their information into a broader automated strategy (Tulchinsky 2019). As stated repeatedly throughout this book, mining for signals in large datasets is prone to multiple testing bias and false discoveries. Regardless of these important caveats, this approach represents a modern alternative to the more conventional features presented in the...