Alla Bannikova

“Each step prepares you for the next one. The projects helped me to gain confidence and the community is very beneficial.”

Alla Bannikova

Data Analyst

Project overview

In this project, you’ll take on the role of a financial analyst tasked with predicting stock market prices using machine learning. You’ll work with historical S&P 500 data, preparing it for analysis, setting up a target variable, training an initial model, and evaluating performance through backtesting.

By adding additional predictors like rolling averages, you’ll aim to improve the model’s predictive power. This project allows you to apply machine learning to a real-world financial scenario, developing skills in time series data handling, model training, and evaluation – valuable additions to a data science portfolio.

Objective: Use machine learning to predict stock market price movement, evaluating and optimizing model performance to build real-world data science skills.

Key skill required

To complete this project, it's recommended to build these foundational skills in Python

  • Manipulating data using Python data structures and control flow
  • Working with pandas DataFrames to analyze data
  • Performing operations on NumPy arrays
  • Applying basic machine learning concepts and models

Projects steps

Step 1: Project Overview

Step 2: Cleaning and Visualizing Our Stock Market Data

Step 3: Preparing Our Target for Machine Learning

Step 4: Training an Initial Machine Learning Model

Step 5: Building a Backtesting System

Step 6: Adding Additional Predictors to Our Model

Step 7: Improving Our Model

Step 8: Next Steps

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