All episodes of Chat With Traders x Quantopian mini-series are available here.

Machine learning is a hot topic right now, with a lot of people wondering how it could be used in finance and trading. Used naively, machine learning poses a great deal of risk. We’ll discuss why that’s the case and also some good ways to use it carefully.

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Topics of discussion:

• What is machine learning and how is it used in everyday life?
• Supervised vs unsupervised machine learning, and when to use each class.
• Does machine learning offer anything more than traditional statistics methods.
• Good (and not so good) uses of machine learning in trading and finance.
• The balance between simplicity and complexity.

“We generally want general models that are relatively simple, and explain as much information as possible, with as few terms as we can.” – Max Margenot

Links and resources mentioned:

• Dr Andrei Kirilenko
• Machine learning (Quantopian forum)
• Machine learning as a factor (Quantopian forum)
• scikit-learn
• Andrew Ng
• @Clean_Utensils

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