In this series of articles, we've created and optimized a Bitcoin trading agent to be highly profitable using deep reinforcement learning.

Data sets: https://www.cryptodatadownload.com/data/northamerican/

If you'd like to learn more about how we created this agent, check out the Medium article: https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-bitcoin-trading-bots-that-dont-lose-money-2e7165fb0b29

Later, we optimized this repo for massive profits using feature engineering and Bayesian optimization, check it out: https://towardsdatascience.com/using-reinforcement-learning-to-trade-bitcoin-for-massive-profit-b69d0e8f583b

The first thing you will need to do to get started is install the requirements in requirements.txt.

pip install -r requirements.txt

The requirements include the tensorflow-gpu library, though if you do not have access to a GPU, you should replace this requirement with tensorflow.

While you could just let the agent train and run with the default PPO2 hyper-parameters, your agent would likely not be very profitable. The stable-baselines library provides a great set of default parameters that work for most problem domains, but we need to better.

To do this, you will need to run optimize.py. Within the file, you can define the reward_strategy for the environment to use, this is currently defaulted to sortino.

python ./optimize.py

This will take a while (hours to days depending on your hardware setup), but over time it will print to the console as trials are completed. Once a trial is completed, it will be stored in ./params.db, an SQLite database, from which we can pull hyper-parameters to train our agent.

Once you've found a good set of hyper-parameters, we can train an agent with that set. To do this, you will want to open train.py and ensure the reward_strategy is set to the correct strategy. Then let train.py run until you've got some saved models to test.

python ./train.py

If you have already trained a model, and would like to resume training from the next epoch, you can set curr_idx at the top of the file to the index of the last trained model. Otherwise, leave this at -1 to start training at epoch 0.

Once you've successfully trained and saved a model, it's time to test it. Open up test.py and set the reward_strategy to the correct strategy and curr_idx to the index of the agent you'd like to train. Then run test.py to watch your agent trade.

python ./test.py

Contributions are encouraged and I will always do my best to get them implemented into the library ASAP. This project is meant to grow as the community around it grows. Let me know if there is anything that you would like to see in the future or if there is anything you feel is missing.