Time series forecasting of energy commodity using grey wolf optimizer

The ability to model and perform decision making is an essential feature of many real-world applications including the forecasting of commodity prices.In this study, a forecasting model based on a relatively new Swarm Intelligence (SI) behaviour, namely Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), is developed for short term time series forecasting.The model is built upon data obtained from the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil and gasoline price.Performance of the GWO model is compared against two other models which are developed based on Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms, namely the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) and Differential Evolution (DE).Results showed that the GWO model outperformed DE in both crude oil and gasoline price forecasting. Furthermore, the proposed GWO produces a better forecast for gasoline price as compared to the ABC model,, as well as being at par in crude oil.Such an achievement indicates that GWO may become a competitor in the domain of time series forecasting and would be useful for investors in planning their investment and projecting their profit

Machine Learning Methods to Exploit the Predictive Power of Open, High, Low, Close (OHLC) Data

Novel machine learning techniques are developed for the prediction of financial markets, with a combination of supervised, unsupervised and Bayesian optimisation machine learning methods shown able to give a predictive power rarely previously observed. A new data mining technique named Deep Candlestick Mining (DCM) is proposed that is able to discover highly predictive dataset specific candlestick patterns (arrangements of open, high, low, close (OHLC) aggregated price data structures) which significantly outperform traditional candlestick patterns. The power that OHLC features can provide is further investigated, using LSTM RNNs and XGBoost trees, in the prediction of a mid-price directional change, defined here as the mid-point between either the open and close or high and low of an OHLC bar. This target variable has been overlooked in the literature, which is surprising given the relative ease of predicting it, significantly in excess of noisier financial quantities. However, the true value of this quantity is only known upon the period's ending – i.e. it is an after-the-fact observation. To make use of and enhance the remarkable predictability of the mid-price directional change, multi-period predictions are investigated by training many LSTM RNNs (XGBoost trees being used to identify powerful OHLC input feature combinations), over different time horizons, to construct a Bayesian optimised trend prediction ensemble. This fusion of long-, medium- and short-term information results in a model capable of predicting market trend direction to greater than 70% better than random. A trading strategy is constructed to demonstrate how this predictive power can be used by exploiting an artefact of the LSTM RNN training process which allows the trading system to size and place trades in accordance with the ensemble's predictive certainty