Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading

Scraping OpenTable data

Typical sources of alternative data are review websites such as Glassdoor or Yelp that convey insider insights using employee comments or guest reviews. This data provides valuable input for ML models that aim to predict a business' prospects or directly its market value to obtain trading signals.

The data needs to be extracted from the HTML source, barring any legal obstacles. To illustrate the web scraping tools that Python offers, we'll retrieve information on restaurant bookings from OpenTable. Data of this nature could be used to forecast economic activity by geography, real estate prices, or restaurant chain revenues.