8351  Reviews star_rate star_rate star_rate star_rate star_half

Advanced Python for Financial Technologies

Maximize returns. Visualize your portfolio. Execute your latest Killer Trading Algorithm. All of these and more are easily within reach by harnessing the open-source power of Python. This Advanced...

Read More
By Request
Contact Us For Pricing
Duration 3 days
Course Code PYTH-134
Available Formats Classroom

Overview

Maximize returns. Visualize your portfolio. Execute your latest Killer Trading Algorithm. All of these and more are easily within reach by harnessing the open-source power of Python.

This Advanced Python course, Python for Finance Training, teaches you how to apply Python to a diverse range of financial technology applications, including acquiring data from popular financial data providers, as well as cleaning, exploring, and visualizing the resulting datasets. Attendees learn how to approach the implementation of algorithmic models and how to construct rich and insightful models, with an emphasis on ethics, compliance, and security. 

Skills Gained

  • Automatically extract financial data from common data providers
  • Know how to clean, aggregate, and manipulate financial data effectively
  • Conduct elementary time series analysis
  • Understand stochastic processes and common noise models
  • Construct models for inference and forecasting, such as ARIMA and linear and logistic regression
  • Generate powerful visualizations, such as candlestick charts
  • Extract financial data by scraping websites
  • Understand the fundamentals of supervised and unsupervised machine learning models as applied to finance
  • Apply Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory Units (LSTMs) to financial time series and understand their limitations
  • Understand the principles behind Blockchain technology  

Prerequisites

All Python For Finance training students should already be somewhat familiar with fundamental Python syntax and concepts.

Course Details

Training Materials

All students receive comprehensive courseware.

Software Requirements

  • Any Windows, Linux, or macOS operating system
  • Python 3.x installed (Anaconda bundle recommended)
  • An IDE with Python support (Jupyter Notebook, Spyder or PyCharm Community Edition)

Outline

  • Introduction
  • Crunching the Numbers: Numerical Python With NumPy
    • Introduction to the n-d-array
    • NumPy operations
    • Broadcasting
    • Missing data in NumPy (masked array)
    • NumPy structured arrays
    • Improving performance through vectorization
    • Random number generation
    • Introduction to Monte-Carlo methods
    • General approaches to implementing mathematical algorithms
  • Acquiring and Manipulating Financial Data With Pandas and Pandas-Datareader
    • Series versus DataFrames
    • Overview of data types in pandas
    • Pandas I/O tools: CSV/Excel/SQL
    • Pandas I/O tools: Pandas-datareader
    • Subsetting DataFrames
    • Creating and deleting variables
    • Discretization of continuous data
    • Scaling and standardizing data
    • Identifying duplicates
    • Dummy coding
  • Exploratory Data Analysis and Advanced Pandas Methods
    • Uni- and multivariate statistical summaries and detecting outliers
    • Group-wise calculations using pandas
    • Pivot tables
    • Long to wide and back: pivoting, stacking and melting
    • Python visualization: Matplotlib and seaborn
    • Pandas visualization: histograms, bar and box plots
    • Pandas visualization: Scatter plots and pie charts
    • Group-by plotting
    • Pandas plot formatting
    • mpl-finance and candlestick charts
    • Merging DataFrames
    • Pandas string methods
    • Implementing regular expressions in pandas
    • Handling missing data in pandas
  • Elementary Time Series Analysis
    • Date/time formats in Python and pandas
    • Running/rolling aggregates
    • Resampling
  • Stochastic Processes
    • Overview of noise models
    • Stationarity
    • Random walks and martingales
    • Brownian motion
    • Diffusion models
    • The Black-Scholes model—and its limitations
  • Time Series Forecasting
    • De-trending and seasonality
    • Interpolation and extrapolation
    • Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models
  • Measuring Impact: Testing For Group Differences
    • Null hypothesis testing and p-values
    • Group comparisons (p-values, t-tests, ANOVA, Chi-square tests)
    • Correlation
  • Progressing, With Regression Models
    • Linear regression
    • Logistic regression
    • Regression on count outcomes (Poisson processes)
  • Conclusion
  • Optional: Machine Learning Fundamentals for Finance with scikit-learn
    • Requirements: NumPy, pandas. Time required: 4 hours
    • Machine learning approaches to multivariate statistics
    • Machine Learning theory
    • Data pre-processing
    • Supervised versus Unsupervised learning
    • Unsupervised learning: clustering
      • Clustering algorithms
      • Evaluating cluster performance
    • Dimensionality reduction
      • A priori
      • Principal component analysis (PCA)
      • Penalized regression
    • Supervised learning: regression
      • Linear regression
      • Penalized linear regression
      • Stochastic gradient descent
      • Scoring new data sets
      • Cross-validation
      • Variance-bias trade-off
      • Feature importance
    • Supervised learning: classification
      • Logistic regression
      • LASSO
      • Random forests
      • Ensemble methods
      • Feature importance
      • Scoring new data sets
      • Cross-validation
  • Optional: Recurrent Neural Nets and LSTMs with PyTorch
    • Requirements: NumPy, pandas, Machine Learning fundamentals. Time required: 4 hours
    • Introduction to PyTorch
      • Introduction to tensor algebra and calculus
      • Tensor algebra in PyTorch
      • Training and validating models
    • Regression in PyTorch
      • Optimizers in PyTorch
      • Linear regression
      • Logistic regression
    • Artificial Neural Networks
      • Overview of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)
      • Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)
      • Sequence models and Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs)
    • RNNs/LSTMs with PyTorch
      • Building, training and validating a basic ANN
      • Creating a RNN
      • Building a LSTM
      • Applications to financial time series, and cautionary tales
  • Optional: Scraping By: Obtaining Financial Data from Publicly Accessible Websites
    • Requirements: Base Python. Time required: 2 hours
    • Parsing HTML/CSS with BeautifulSoup
      • Navigating tree data structures
      • Selecting named node elements
      • Selecting by property
    • Establishing a Connection
      • Urllib3 and connections
      • POST and GET directives
    • Building a Web Scraper
      • Parsing a list of websites
      • Collecting and storing data
    • Advanced Scraping: Building a Web Spider with Scrapy
  • Optional: Blockchain technologies
    • Requirements: Basic Python, NumPy (useful, but not mandatory). Time required: 4 hours.
    • The Ingredients For a Blockchain
      • Transaction records
      • The distributed ledger
      • Chain validation
      • Nonces
    • The Hash Function
      • Overview of hash functions and tables
      • Cryptographic hash functions
      • Proof-of-work
    • Advanced Functions
      • Return statements
      • The JSON format
      • Exception trapping
      • Assertions
    • Constructing Your Own Blockchain
      • Generating a block
      • The genesis block
      • Generating a chain though block validation
    • Shortcomings of current blockchain technologies
Read Less

Schedule

Upcoming Course Dates

There are currently no scheduled dates for this course. If you are interested in this course, contact us with the form below.

Contact Information

FAQ

Does the course schedule include a Lunchbreak?

Classes typically include a 1-hour lunch break around midday. However, the exact break times and duration can vary depending on the specific class. Your instructor will provide detailed information at the start of the course.

What languages are used to deliver training?

Most courses are conducted in English, unless otherwise specified. Some courses will have the word "FRENCH" marked in red beside the scheduled date(s) indicating the language of instruction.

What does GTR stand for?

GTR stands for Guaranteed to Run; if you see a course with this status, it means this event is confirmed to run. View our GTR page to see our full list of Guaranteed to Run courses.

Does Ascendient Learning deliver group training?

Yes, we provide training for groups, individuals and private on sites. View our group training page for more information.

What does vendor-authorized training mean?

As a vendor-authorized training partner, we offer a curriculum that our partners have vetted. We use the same course materials and facilitate the same labs as our vendor-delivered training. These courses are considered the gold standard and, as such, are priced accordingly.

Is the training too basic, or will you go deep into technology?

It depends on your requirements, your role in your company, and your depth of knowledge. The good news about many of our learning paths, you can start from the fundamentals to highly specialized training.

How up-to-date are your courses and support materials?

We continuously work with our vendors to evaluate and refresh course material to reflect the latest training courses and best practices.

Are your instructors seasoned trainers who have deep knowledge of the training topic?

Ascendient Learning instructors have an average of 27 years of practical IT experience and have also served as consultants for an average of 15 years. To stay current, instructors spend at least 25 percent of their time learning new, emerging technologies and courses.

Do you provide hands-on training and exercises in an actual lab environment?

Lab access is dependent on the vendor and the type of training you sign up for. However, many of our top vendors will provide lab access to students to test and practice. The course description will specify lab access.

Will you customize the training for our company’s specific needs and goals?

We will work with you to identify training needs and areas of growth.  We offer a variety of training methods, such as private group training, on-site of your choice, and virtually. We provide courses and certifications that are aligned with your business goals.

How do I get started with certification?

Getting started on a certification pathway depends on your goals and the vendor you choose to get certified in. Many vendors offer entry-level IT certification to advanced IT certification that can boost your career. To get access to certification vouchers and discounts, please contact info@ascendientlearning.com.

Will I get access to content after I complete a course?

You will get access to the PDF of course books and guides, but access to the recording and slides will depend on the vendor and type of training you receive.

How do I request a W9 for Ascendient Learning?

View our filing status and how to request a W9.

Reviews

It was very informative and covered all the required materials along with handson labs for practice.

I liked the pace of the course. I like that I have more than instance to use the lab.

The class and material is good. I think some of the software needs to be updated.

Labs and the study materials provided for Architecting on AWS course are very easy to understand and explains all the topics required to pass the Associate certification.

Although there seemed to be too many links for the course, everything worked smoothly.