This is a course for financial analysts, traders, risk analysts, fund managers, researchers, data scientists, statisticians, and software developers.
Some familiarity with programming concepts (in any language) is assumed.
By the end of the course, you will have all the knowledge you need to start using Python competently for processing, analysing, modelling, and visualising financial data, with a focus on time series. You will have had experience with using Python for various scripting, data-manipulation and visualisation tasks with data in a variety of formats, including SQL databases, CSV, Excel spreadsheets, JSON, and API endpoints. You will know how to slice, dice, merge, aggregate, pivot, clean, munge, resample, and plot financial time-series data with ease. You will understand the elegance and power of the Python language and its powerful ecosystem of packages for finance and data analytics, and you will be well-placed to continue learning more as you use it day-to-day.
Day 1 covers how to use Python for basic scripting and automation tasks, including tips and tricks for making this easy:
Why Python? What’s possible?
The Jupyter notebook for rapid prototyping
Modules and packages
Python concepts: an introduction through examples
Essential data types: strings, tuples, lists, dicts
Worked example: retrieving real-time data from a REST web API
Raising and handling exceptions
Python offers amazingly productive tools like Pandas for working with different kinds of data. Day 2 gives a thorough introduction to analyzing and visualizing data easily:
Reading and writing essential data formats: CSV, Excel, SQL, time-series (others on request)
Indexing and selecting data in Pandas
Data fusion: joining & merging datasets
Summarization with “group by” operations; pivot tables
Visualization and statistical graphics with Plotly Express
Worked example: creating automated reports
Creating interactive dashboards with Streamlit
Day 3 shows you how to manipulate time-series and matrix/vector data. It then gives examples of Monte Carlo simulation and shows you how to apply powerful techniques for linear regression, clustering, and outlier / anomaly detection:
Handling time-series data: parsing dates; resampling; interpolation
Introduction to NumPy for manipulating vector and matrix data: data types, powerful indexing, reshaping, ufuncs
Monte Carlo simulation and applications
Clustering with scikit-learn: applications to customer profiling, text correction, quantization
Outlier and anomaly detection with pyod; applications to time-series
Day 4 gives you a practical and comprehensive introduction to machine learning for powerfully inferring complex models from data, with examples selected from a range of industries, including time-series and spatial datasets:
Intuition behind ML; overview of the ML package ecosystem in Python
Linear and nonlinear regression; application to time-series forecasting
Classification; application to diagnosis, AI systems, satellite imagery, ...
Validation and model selection; diagnostic tools; yellowbrick
Feature engineering and selection; eli5
Deploying machine learning models in production
Overview of core ML algorithms with scikit-learn: Naive Bayes, logistic regression, SVMs, random forests
Day 5 teaches you in-depth about munging, modelling, and visualization of financial time-series data in Python:
Rehaping of dataframes with stack/unstack/melt; hierarchical indices
Categorical, string, and datetime columns; binning continuous data
Joining of time series; searchsorted; merge_asof
Data cleaning; interpolation; imputing missing data
Common time-series models in Python: AR, ARIMA
Simulation examples: Monte Carlo risk analysis; Black-Scholes pricing
(Optional): 2-way integration of Python with Excel using xlwings
We are happy to offer on-the-spot problem-solving after each day of the training for you to ask one-on-one questions — whether about the course content and exercises or about specific problems you face in your work and how to solve them. If you would like us to prepare for this in advance, you are welcome to send us background info before the course.
Format:
Courses are conducted online via video meeting using Python Charmers' cloud notebook server for sharing code with the trainer(s).
Computer:
Hardware: we recommend ≥ 8 GB of RAM and a webcam. Preferably also multiple screens and a quiet room (or headset mic).
Software: a modern browser: Chrome, Firefox, or Safari (not IE or Edge); and Zoom.
Coding: we have a cloud-based coding server that supports running code and sharing code with the trainer(s).
Timing:
Most courses will run from 9:00 to roughly 17:00 (AEST) each day, with breaks of 50 minutes for lunch and 20 minutes each for morning and afternoon tea.
Certificate of completion:
We will provide you a certificate if you complete the course and successfully answer the majority of the exercise questions.
Materials:
You will have access to all the course materials via the cloud server.
We will also send you a bound copy of the course notes, cheat sheets, and a USB stick containing the materials, exercise solutions, and further resources.