Overview¶

This is where the “deep” part of the deep reinforcement learning framework come in. Learning agents are where the math (read: magic) happens.

At each time step, the agent takes the observation from the environment as input, runs it through its underlying model (a neural network most of the time), and outputs the action to take. For example, the observation might be the previous open, high, low, and close price from the exchange. The learning model would take these values as input and output a value corresponding to the action to take, such as buy, sell, or hold.

It is important to remember the learning model has no intuition of the prices or trades being represented by these values. Rather, the model is simply learning which values to output for specific input values or sequences of input values, to earn the highest reward.

In this example, we will be using the Stable Baselines library to provide learning agents to our trading scheme, however, the TensorTrade framework is compatible with many reinforcement learning libraries such as Tensorforce, Ray’s RLLib, OpenAI’s Baselines, Intel’s Coach, or anything from the TensorFlow line such as TF Agents.

It is possible that custom TensorTrade learning agents will be added to this framework in the future, though it will always be a goal of the framework to be interoperable with as many existing reinforcement learning libraries as possible, since there is so much concurrent growth in the space. But for now, Stable Baselines is simple and powerful enough for our needs.

Ray¶

The following is an example of how to train a strategy on ray using the PPO algorithm.

import ray
import numpy as np

from ray import tune
from ray.tune.registry import register_env

USD = Instrument("USD", 2, "U.S. Dollar")
TTC = Instrument("TTC", 8, "TensorTrade Coin")

def create_env(config):
x = np.arange(0, 2*np.pi, 2*np.pi / 1000)
p = Stream.source(50*np.sin(3*x) + 100, dtype="float").rename("USD-TTC")

coinbase = Exchange("coinbase", service=execute_order)(
p
)

cash = Wallet(coinbase, 100000 * USD)
asset = Wallet(coinbase, 0 * TTC)

portfolio = Portfolio(USD, [
cash,
asset
])

feed = DataFeed([
p,
p.rolling(window=10).mean().rename("fast"),
p.rolling(window=50).mean().rename("medium"),
p.rolling(window=100).mean().rename("slow"),
p.log().diff().fillna(0).rename("lr")
])

reward_scheme = default.rewards.PBR(price=p)

action_scheme = default.actions.BSH(
cash=cash,
asset=asset
).attach(reward_scheme)

env = default.create(
feed=feed,
portfolio=portfolio,
action_scheme=action_scheme,
reward_scheme=reward_scheme,
window_size=config["window_size"],
max_allowed_loss=0.6
)
return env

analysis = tune.run(
"PPO",
stop={
"episode_reward_mean": 500
},
config={
"env_config": {
"window_size": 25
},
"log_level": "DEBUG",
"framework": "torch",
"ignore_worker_failures": True,
"num_workers": 1,
"num_gpus": 0,
"clip_rewards": True,
"lr": 8e-6,
"lr_schedule": [
[0, 1e-1],
[int(1e2), 1e-2],
[int(1e3), 1e-3],
[int(1e4), 1e-4],
[int(1e5), 1e-5],
[int(1e6), 1e-6],
[int(1e7), 1e-7]
],
"gamma": 0,
"observation_filter": "MeanStdFilter",
"lambda": 0.72,
"vf_loss_coeff": 0.5,
"entropy_coeff": 0.01
},
checkpoint_at_end=True
)


And then to restore the agent just use the following code.

import ray.rllib.agents.ppo as ppo

# Get checkpoint
checkpoints = analysis.get_trial_checkpoints_paths(
trial=analysis.get_best_trial("episode_reward_mean"),
metric="episode_reward_mean"
)
checkpoint_path = checkpoints[0][0]

# Restore agent
agent = ppo.PPOTrainer(
config={
"env_config": {
"window_size": 25
},
"framework": "torch",
"log_level": "DEBUG",
"ignore_worker_failures": True,
"num_workers": 1,
"num_gpus": 0,
"clip_rewards": True,
"lr": 8e-6,
"lr_schedule": [
[0, 1e-1],
[int(1e2), 1e-2],
[int(1e3), 1e-3],
[int(1e4), 1e-4],
[int(1e5), 1e-5],
[int(1e6), 1e-6],
[int(1e7), 1e-7]
],
"gamma": 0,
"observation_filter": "MeanStdFilter",
"lambda": 0.72,
"vf_loss_coeff": 0.5,
"entropy_coeff": 0.01
}
)
agent.restore(checkpoint_path)


Stable Baselines¶

from stable_baselines.common.policies import MlpLnLstmPolicy
from stable_baselines import PPO2

model = PPO2
policy = MlpLnLstmPolicy
params = { "learning_rate": 1e-5 }

agent = model(policy, environment, model_kwargs=params)


Tensorforce¶

I will also quickly cover the Tensorforce library to show how simple it is to switch between reinforcement learning frameworks.

from tensorforce.agents import Agent

agent_spec = {
"type": "ppo_agent",
"step_optimizer": {
"learning_rate": 1e-4
},
"discount": 0.99,
"likelihood_ratio_clipping": 0.2,
}

network_spec = [
dict(type='dense', size=64, activation="tanh"),
dict(type='dense', size=32, activation="tanh")
]

agent = Agent.from_spec(spec=agent_spec,
kwargs=dict(network=network_spec,
states=environment.states,
actions=environment.actions))


If you would like to know more about Tensorforce agents, you can view the Documentation.