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

Who should read this book

You should find the book informative if you are an analyst, data scientist, or ML engineer with an understanding of financial markets and an interest in trading strategies. You should also find value as an investment professional who aims to leverage ML to make better decisions.

If your background is in software and ML, you may be able to just skim or skip some introductory material in this area. Similarly, if your expertise is in investment, you will likely be familiar with some, or all, of the financial context that we provide for those with different backgrounds.

The book assumes that you want to continue to learn about this very dynamic area. To this end, it includes numerous end-of-chapter academic references and additional resources linked in the README files for each chapter in the companion GitHub repository.

You should be comfortable using Python 3 and scientific computing libraries like NumPy, pandas, or SciPy and look forward to picking up numerous others along the way. Some experience with ML and scikit-learn would be helpful, but we briefly cover the basic workflow and reference various resources to fill gaps or dive deeper. Similarly, basic knowledge of finance and investment will make some terminology easier to follow.