crypto-trading-ai

🤖 Autonomous Crypto Trading AI Agent

A deep reinforcement learning-based autonomous cryptocurrency trading agent using Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) with multi-timeframe OHLCV analysis.

Architecture

crypto_trading_ai/
├── README.md
├── requirements.txt
├── config/
│   └── config.yaml              # All hyperparameters & settings
├── data/
│   ├── downloader.py            # OHLCV data download (ccxt)
│   ├── features.py              # Technical indicators & feature engineering
│   └── normalizer.py            # Normalization pipeline [-1, 1]
├── env/
│   ├── trading_env.py           # Gymnasium trading environment
│   └── multi_timeframe.py       # Multi-timeframe data alignment
├── agent/
│   ├── networks.py              # Actor & Critic neural networks (CNN-LSTM)
│   ├── sac.py                   # SAC algorithm implementation
│   └── replay_buffer.py         # Prioritized experience replay
├── train.py                     # Training entry point
├── evaluate.py                  # Backtesting & evaluation
└── utils/
    ├── logger.py                # Training logger & TensorBoard
    └── helpers.py               # Utility functions

Key Design Decisions (Research-Backed)

Algorithm: SAC (Soft Actor-Critic)

• Why: Best for continuous action spaces (position size, leverage, direction)
• Entropy regularization: Automatic exploration-exploitation balance via learnable alpha
• Off-policy: Sample efficient with prioritized experience replay
• Reference: Haarnoja et al. 2018, FinRL (Yang et al. 2020, arXiv:2011.09607)

State Space (Observation)

• Primary timeframe: 15-minute candles
• Higher timeframes: 1H, 4H resampled and aligned (no future data leakage)
• Lookback horizon: 64 candles = agent sees last 16 hours of 15m data
• Features per candle: 21 (OHLCV derivatives + 14 technical indicators)
• Total observation: (3 timeframes × 64 lookback × 21 features) + 5 portfolio state = 4,037 dimensions
• All features normalized to [-1, 1] using adaptive rolling z-score

Feature Engineering (21 features per candle)

Action Space (Continuous, 3D)

Neural Network Architecture: CNN-LSTM

1. 1D CNN (shared weights across timeframes): Extracts local candle patterns
   • 3 layers: 32→64→128 channels, kernel_size=3, LayerNorm + GELU
2. Adaptive pooling: Reduces sequence to 16 timesteps
3. LSTM: Captures temporal dependencies (256 hidden, 2 layers)
4. Actor MLP: 256→128 → mean + log_std (squashed Gaussian)
5. Twin Critic MLP: 256→128 → Q-value (min of two critics)

• Total: ~1.55M parameters

Reward Function (Composite)

• Log return × 100 (captures compounding, scaled for learning)
• Rolling Sharpe ratio component (risk-adjusted performance)
• Trade penalty (discourages overtrading)
• Drawdown penalty (penalizes drawdowns > 10%)
• Hold bonus (encourages holding profitable positions)

Trading Environment

• Gymnasium-compatible with proper reset()/step() API
• Realistic: commission (0.04%), slippage (0.01%), liquidation
• Episode terminates on 30% drawdown or 95% capital loss
• Random episode start for diverse training experiences

Quick Start

# Clone and install
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Option A: Download real data from Binance
python -m crypto_trading_ai.data.downloader --config config/config.yaml

# Option B: Generate synthetic data for testing
python -m crypto_trading_ai.data.downloader --config config/config.yaml --synthetic

# Train (auto-generates synthetic data if no CSV files found)
cd crypto_trading_ai
python train.py --synthetic

# Evaluate / Backtest
python evaluate.py --synthetic --plot

Training on GPU (recommended)

# The training is designed for GPU acceleration
# On a T4 GPU: ~300 steps/s with default config
# On CPU: ~30 steps/s with reduced config
python train.py --config config/config.yaml

Configuration

Edit config/config.yaml to customize everything:

Hyperparameter Tuning Tips

• Lookback window: 32-128 (64 is default, good balance)
• Learning rate: 1e-4 to 5e-4 (3e-4 default)
• Batch size: 128-512 (256 default)
• Buffer size: 200K-1M (500K default)
• Max leverage: Set based on risk tolerance (default 10x)

Evaluation Metrics

After training, the evaluation generates:

• Equity curve plot with profit/loss coloring
• Position history (long/short over time)
• Drawdown chart
• Action distribution histograms
• Detailed trade log (CSV)
• Summary metrics: Total Return, Sharpe Ratio, Max Drawdown, Win Rate, Profit Factor

Technical Details

Normalization Pipeline

Raw OHLCV → Price-relative features → Rolling Z-score → Clip to [-1, 1]

• Prices converted to returns/ratios (no raw prices in observation)
• RSI/Stochastic: [0,100] → [-1,1] via linear rescale
• MACD/Volume/SMA: Rolling z-score over 256 periods, then z/3 and clip
• Normalization stats saved for inference consistency

Multi-Timeframe Alignment

• Higher timeframe candles aligned using searchsorted (O(n log n))
• Only completed candles used (no future data leakage)
• Each timeframe has its own lookback window, right-padded with zeros

SAC Implementation Details

• Auto entropy tuning: Target entropy = -dim(action_space)
• Twin critics: Min of two Q-networks to reduce overestimation
• Prioritized replay: TD-error based priorities with importance sampling
• Gradient clipping: Max norm = 1.0 for stability
• Soft target updates: τ = 0.005 (Polyak averaging)

License

MIT