Observer

The Observer component is what the environment uses to represent the way the agent sees the environment. The way it is built in the default environment is with the help of the DataFeed. There were many reasons for this decision, but the most important ones are that we would like to be able to compute path-dependent observations in a reliable way. We would also like to minimize lookahead biases and we would also like it to translate well into the live setting as well. To leave the opportunities broad, however, all you need to do is fill out the observe method to determine what your agent sees next.

Default

The default observer at the moment uses a structure of a look-back window in order to create an observation. After the feed is made the environment will use a window of past observations and will have the shape (window_size, n_features).

IntradayObserver

The IntradayObserver divides the DataFeed into episodes of single trading days. It takes the same parameters as the default observer and additional parameters of stop_time of type datetime.time and randomize of type bool. stop_time is the datetime.time of the timestamp in the DataFrame that marks the end of the episode. It is imperative to ensure that each trading day includes the respective timestamp. randomize determines if the episode, or trading day, should be selected randomly or in the sequence of the DataFeed. The IntradayObserver requires that the DataFeed include a Stream of timestamps named 'timestamp'.