You're reading from Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading Predictive models to extract signals from market and alternative data for systematic trading strategies with Python

Product type Paperback

Published in Jul 2020

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781839217715

Length 820 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

TensorFlow

Concepts

Machine Learning

Author (1):

Stefan Jansen

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Table of Contents (27) Chapters

Preface

1. Machine Learning for Trading – From Idea to Execution

2. Market and Fundamental Data – Sources and Techniques FREE CHAPTER

3. Alternative Data for Finance – Categories and Use Cases

4. Financial Feature Engineering – How to Research Alpha Factors

5. Portfolio Optimization and Performance Evaluation

6. The Machine Learning Process

7. Linear Models – From Risk Factors to Return Forecasts

8. The ML4T Workflow – From Model to Strategy Backtesting

9. Time-Series Models for Volatility Forecasts and Statistical Arbitrage

10. Bayesian ML – Dynamic Sharpe Ratios and Pairs Trading

11. Random Forests – A Long-Short Strategy for Japanese Stocks

12. Boosting Your Trading Strategy

13. Data-Driven Risk Factors and Asset Allocation with Unsupervised Learning

14. Text Data for Trading – Sentiment Analysis

15. Topic Modeling – Summarizing Financial News

16. Word Embeddings for Earnings Calls and SEC Filings

17. Deep Learning for Trading

18. CNNs for Financial Time Series and Satellite Images

19. RNNs for Multivariate Time Series and Sentiment Analysis

20. Autoencoders for Conditional Risk Factors and Asset Pricing

21. Generative Adversarial Networks for Synthetic Time-Series Data

22. Deep Reinforcement Learning – Building a Trading Agent

23. Conclusions and Next Steps

24. References

25. Index

Appendix: Alpha Factor Library

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the gradient boosting algorithm, which is used to build ensembles in a sequential manner, adding a shallow decision tree that only uses a very small number of features to improve on the predictions that have been made. We saw how gradient boosting trees can be very flexibly applied to a broad range of loss functions, as well as offer many opportunities to tune the model to a given dataset and learning task.

Recent implementations have greatly facilitated the use of gradient boosting. They've done this by accelerating the training process and offering more consistent and detailed insights into the importance of features and the drivers of individual predictions.

Finally, we developed a simple trading strategy driven by an ensemble of gradient boosting models that was actually profitable, at least before significant trading costs. We also saw how to use gradient boosting with high-frequency data.

In the next chapter, we will turn...