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

Bivariate and multivariate factor evaluation

To evaluate the numerous factors, we rely on the various performance measures introduced in this book, including the following:

  • Bivariate measures of the signal content of a factor with respect to the one-day forward returns
  • Multivariate measures of feature importance for a gradient boosting model trained to predict the one-day forward returns using all factors
  • Financial performance of portfolios invested according to factor quantiles using Alphalens

We will first discuss the bivariate metrics and then turn to the multivariate metrics; we will conclude by comparing the results. See the notebook factor_evaluation for the relevant code examples and additional exploratory analysis, such as the correlation among the factors, which we'll omit here.

Information coefficient and mutual information

We will use the following bivariate metrics, which we introduced in Chapter 4, Financial Feature Engineering...