Forecasting Long-Term Government Bond Yields: An Application of Statistical and AI Models

This paper evaluates several artificial intelligence and classical algorithms on their ability of forecasting the monthly yield of the US 10-year Treasury bonds from a set of four economic indicators. Due to the complexity of the prediction problem, the task represents a challenging test for the algorithms under evaluation. At the same time, the study is of particular significance for the important and paradigmatic role played by the US market in the world economy. Four data-driven artificial intelligence approaches are considered, namely, a manually built fuzzy logic model, a machine learned fuzzy logic model, a self-organising map model and a multi-layer perceptron model. Their performance is compared with the performance of two classical approaches, namely, a statistical ARIMA model and an econometric error correction model. The algorithms are evaluated on a complete series of end-month US 10-year Treasury bonds yields and economic indicators from 1986:1 to 2004:12. In terms of prediction accuracy and reliability of the modelling procedure, the best results are obtained by the three parametric regression algorithms, namely the econometric, the statistical and the multi-layer perceptron model. Due to the sparseness of the learning data samples, the manual and the automatic fuzzy logic approaches fail to follow with adequate precision the range of variations of the US 10-year Treasury bonds. For similar reasons, the self-organising map model gives an unsatisfactory performance. Analysis of the results indicates that the econometric model has a slight edge over the statistical and the multi-layer perceptron models. This suggests that pure data-driven induction may not fully capture the complicated mechanisms ruling the changes in interest rates. Overall, the prediction accuracy of the best models is only marginally better than the prediction accuracy of a basic one-step lag predictor. This result highlights the difficulty of the modelling task and, in general, the difficulty of building reliable predictors for financial markets.interest rates; forecasting; neural networks; fuzzy logic.

Nonlinear Combination of Financial Forecast with Genetic Algorithm

Complexity in the financial markets requires intelligent forecasting models for return volatility. In this paper, historical simulation, GARCH, GARCH with skewed student-t distribution and asymmetric normal mixture GRJ-GARCH models are combined with Extreme Value Theory Hill by using artificial neural networks with genetic algorithm as the combination platform. By employing daily closing values of the Istanbul Stock Exchange from 01/10/1996 to 11/07/2006, Kupiec and Christoffersen tests as the back-testing mechanisms are performed for forecast comparison of the models. Empirical findings show that the fat-tails are more properly captured by the combination of GARCH with skewed student-t distribution and Extreme Value Theory Hill. Modeling return volatility in the emerging markets needs “intelligent” combinations of Value-at-Risk models to capture the extreme movements in the markets rather than individual model forecast.Forecast combination; Artificial neural networks; GARCH models; Extreme value theory; Christoffersen test

The development of hybrid intelligent systems for technical analysis based equivolume charting

This dissertation proposes the development of a hybrid intelligent system applied to technical analysis based equivolume charting for stock trading. A Neuro-Fuzzy based Genetic Algorithms (NF-GA) system of the Volume Adjusted Moving Average (VAMA) membership functions is introduced to evaluate the effectiveness of using a hybrid intelligent system that integrates neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms techniques for increasing the efficiency of technical analysis based equivolume charting for trading stocks --Introduction, page 1

FLANN Based Model to Predict Stock Price Movements of Stock Indices

Financial Forecasting or specifically Stock Market prediction is one of the hottest fields of research lately due to its commercial applications owing to the high stakes and the kinds of attractive benefits that it has to offer. Forecasting the price movements in stock markets has been a major challenge for common investors, businesses, brokers and speculators. As more and more money is being invested the investors get anxious of the future trends of the stock prices in the market. The primary area of concern is to determine the appropriate time to buy, hold or sell. In their quest to forecast, the investors assume that the future trends in the stock market are based at least in part on present and past events and data [1]. However financial time-series is one of the most ‘noisiest’ and ‘non-stationary’ signals present and hence very difficult to forecas

Stock Market Prediction with Multiple Regression, Fuzzy Type-2 Clustering and Neural Networks

AbstractStock market forecasting research offers many challenges and opportunities, with the forecasting of individual stocks or indexes focusing on forecasting either the level (value) of future market prices, or the direction of market price movement. A three-stage stock market prediction system is introduced in this article. In the first phase, Multiple Regression Analysis is applied to define the economic and financial variables which have a strong relationship with the output. In the second phase, Differential Evolution-based type-2 Fuzzy Clustering is implemented to create a prediction model. For the third phase, a Fuzzy type-2 Neural Network is used to perform the reasoning for future stock price prediction. The results of the network simulation show that the suggested model outperforms traditional models for forecasting stock market prices