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.