Modeling Financial Time Series with Artificial Neural Networks

Financial time series convey the decisions and actions of a population of human actors over time. Econometric and regressive models have been developed in the past decades for analyzing these time series. More recently, biologically inspired artificial neural network models have been shown to overcome some of the main challenges of traditional techniques by better exploiting the non-linear, non-stationary, and oscillatory nature of noisy, chaotic human interactions. This review paper explores the options, benefits, and weaknesses of the various forms of artificial neural networks as compared with regression techniques in the field of financial time series analysis.CELEST, a National Science Foundation Science of Learning Center (SBE-0354378); SyNAPSE program of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (HR001109-03-0001

Machine Learning Stock Market Prediction Studies: Review and Research Directions

Stock market investment strategies are complex and rely on an evaluation of vast amounts of data. In recent years, machine learning techniques have increasingly been examined to assess whether they can improve market forecasting when compared with traditional approaches. The objective for this study is to identify directions for future machine learning stock market prediction research based upon a review of current literature. A systematic literature review methodology is used to identify relevant peer-reviewed journal articles from the past twenty years and categorize studies that have similar methods and contexts. Four categories emerge: artificial neural network studies, support vector machine studies, studies using genetic algorithms combined with other techniques, and studies using hybrid or other artificial intelligence approaches. Studies in each category are reviewed to identify common findings, unique findings, limitations, and areas that need further investigation. The final section provides overall conclusions and directions for future research

Predicting stock market movements using network science: An information theoretic approach

A stock market is considered as one of the highly complex systems, which consists of many components whose prices move up and down without having a clear pattern. The complex nature of a stock market challenges us on making a reliable prediction of its future movements. In this paper, we aim at building a new method to forecast the future movements of Standard & Poor's 500 Index (S&P 500) by constructing time-series complex networks of S&P 500 underlying companies by connecting them with links whose weights are given by the mutual information of 60-minute price movements of the pairs of the companies with the consecutive 5,340 minutes price records. We showed that the changes in the strength distributions of the networks provide an important information on the network's future movements. We built several metrics using the strength distributions and network measurements such as centrality, and we combined the best two predictors by performing a linear combination. We found that the combined predictor and the changes in S&P 500 show a quadratic relationship, and it allows us to predict the amplitude of the one step future change in S&P 500. The result showed significant fluctuations in S&P 500 Index when the combined predictor was high. In terms of making the actual index predictions, we built ARIMA models. We found that adding the network measurements into the ARIMA models improves the model accuracy. These findings are useful for financial market policy makers as an indicator based on which they can interfere with the markets before the markets make a drastic change, and for quantitative investors to improve their forecasting models.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 table

The Stock Exchange Prediction using Machine Learning Techniques: A Comprehensive and Systematic Literature Review

This literature review identifies and analyzes research topic trends, types of data sets, learning algorithm, methods improvements, and frameworks used in stock exchange prediction. A total of 81 studies were investigated, which were published regarding stock predictions in the period January 2015 to June 2020 which took into account the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The literature review methodology is carried out in three major phases: review planning, implementation, and report preparation, in nine steps from defining systematic review requirements to presentation of results. Estimation or regression, clustering, association, classification, and preprocessing analysis of data sets are the five main focuses revealed in the main study of stock prediction research. The classification method gets a share of 35.80% from related studies, the estimation method is 56.79%, data analytics is 4.94%, the rest is clustering and association is 1.23%. Furthermore, the use of the technical indicator data set is 74.07%, the rest are combinations of datasets. To develop a stock prediction model 48 different methods have been applied, 9 of the most widely applied methods were identified. The best method in terms of accuracy and also small error rate such as SVM, DNN, CNN, RNN, LSTM, bagging ensembles such as RF, boosting ensembles such as XGBoost, ensemble majority vote and the meta-learner approach is ensemble Stacking. Several techniques are proposed to improve prediction accuracy by combining several methods, using boosting algorithms, adding feature selection and using parameter and hyper-parameter optimization

A Hybrid Neural Network for Stock Price Direction Forecasting

The volatility of stock markets makes them notoriously difficult to predict and is the reason that many investors sell out at the wrong time. Contrary to the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) and the random walk theory, contribution to the study of machine learning models for stock price forecasting has shown evidence of stock markets predictability with varying degrees of success. Contemporary approaches have sought to use a hybrid of convolutional neural network (CNN) for its feature extraction capabilities and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network for its time series prediction. This comparative study aims to determine the predictability of stock price movements by using a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, a standalone LSTM neural network, a random forest model, and support vectors machines (SVM) model. Specifically, the study seeks to explore the predictive ability using stock price data, technical indicators, and foreignexchange (FX) rates transformed into deterministic trend signals as features for a hybrid CNN-LSTM neural network. This paper additionally considered including news article sentiment scores relating to stocks as part of the training dataset, but significant correlation was not found. In this study, the predictive ability is the accuracy of predicting the direction a stock price moves not the actual price. The experiment results suggest that a hybrid CNN-LSTM model can achieve around 60% accuracy trained with deterministic trend signals for stock trend prediction. This accuracy has higher than the accuracy of LSTM, random forest, and SVM. On this basis, one can conclude that the hybrid neural network model is superior to standalone LSTM, random forest, and SVM for stock price trend prediction

An academic review: applications of data mining techniques in finance industry

With the development of Internet techniques, data volumes are doubling every two years, faster than predicted by Moore’s Law. Big Data Analytics becomes particularly important for enterprise business. Modern computational technologies will provide effective tools to help understand hugely accumulated data and leverage this information to get insights into the finance industry. In order to get actionable insights into the business, data has become most valuable asset of financial organisations, as there are no physical products in finance industry to manufacture. This is where data mining techniques come to their rescue by allowing access to the right information at the right time. These techniques are used by the finance industry in various areas such as fraud detection, intelligent forecasting, credit rating, loan management, customer profiling, money laundering, marketing and prediction of price movements to name a few. This work aims to survey the research on data mining techniques applied to the finance industry from 2010 to 2015.The review finds that Stock prediction and Credit rating have received most attention of researchers, compared to Loan prediction, Money Laundering and Time Series prediction. Due to the dynamics, uncertainty and variety of data, nonlinear mapping techniques have been deeply studied than linear techniques. Also it has been proved that hybrid methods are more accurate in prediction, closely followed by Neural Network technique. This survey could provide a clue of applications of data mining techniques for finance industry, and a summary of methodologies for researchers in this area. Especially, it could provide a good vision of Data Mining Techniques in computational finance for beginners who want to work in the field of computational finance