This patch lays the groundwork for a compute engine designed to
facilitate construction of factor-based universe screening and portfolio
allocation. It contains:
A new module, `zipline.modelling`, containing entities that can be used
to express computations as dependency graphs. Each node in such a graph
is an instance of the base `Term` class, defined in
`zipline.modelling.term`. Dependency graphs are executed by instances
of `FFCEngine`, defined in `zipline.modelling.engine`.
A new module, `zipline.data.ffc`, containing loaders and dataset
definitions for inputs to the modelling API.
New `TradingAlgorithm` api methods: `add_factor`, and `add_filter`.
These methods can only be called from `initialize`, and are used to
inform the algorithm that each day it should compute the given terms.
Computed factor results are made available through a new attribute of
the `data` object in `before_trading_start` and `handle_data`. Computed
filter results control which assets are available in the factor matrix
on each day.
TradingAlgorithm always uses set_algo_instance in pairs of
set_algo_instance(self) and set_algo_instance(None). Refactoring this to use a
context manager.
This is a step towards the goal of uniting Quantopian scripts
and zipline.
To make the syntax of zipline identical to Quantopian
we break out the API methods (like order) and turn them into
functions. To access the algo object we add a thread local reference
to the current algorithm that is accessed in the API functions.
TradingAlgorithm now takes either a string or two functions
(initialize and handle_data) that it executes.
Use api method decorator for methods available in algoscript.
Ported appropriate algorithm tests from internal code.
Scott Sanderson