Artificial Neural Networks for Financial Time Series Prediction

Financial market forecasting is a challenging and complex task due to the sensitivity of the market to various factors such as political, economic, and social factors. However, recent advances in machine learning and computation technology have led to an increased interest in using deep learning for forecasting financial data. One the one hand, the famous efficient market hypothesis states that the market is so efficient that no one can consistently benefit from it, and the random walk theory suggests that asset prices are unpredictable based on historical data. On the other hand, previous research has shown that financial time series can be forecasted to some extent using artificial neural networks (ANNs). Despite being a relatively new addition to financial research with less study than the traditional models such as moving averages and linear regression models, ANNs have been shown to outperform the traditional models to some extent. Hence, considering the efficient market hypothesis and the random walk theory, there is a knowledge gap on whether neural networks can be used for financial time series prediction. This paper explores the use of ANNs, specifically recurrent neural networks, to predict financial time series data using a long short-term memory (LSTM) network model. The study will employ an experimental research strategy to construct and test an LSTM model to predict financial time series data, with the aim of examining its performance and evaluating it relative to other models and methods. For evaluating its performance, evaluation metrics are computed and the model is compared with a constructed simple moving average (SMA) model as well as other models in existing studies. The paper also explores the application and processing of transformed financial data, where it was found that achieving stationarity by data transformation was not necessary for the LSTM model to perform better. The study also found that the LSTM model outperformed the SMA model when hyperparameters were set to capture long-term dependencies. However, in the short-term, the SMA model outperformed the LSTM model