ANN based method for improving gold price forecasting accuracy through modified gradient descent methods

Abstract

Forecast of prices of financial assets including gold is of considerable importance for planning the economy. For centuries, people have been holding gold for many important reasons such as smoothening inflation fluctuations, protection from an economic crisis, sound investment etc.. Forecasting of gold prices is therefore an ever important exercise undertaken both by individuals and groups. Various local, global, political, psychological and economic factors make such a forecast a complex problem. Data analysts have been increasingly applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to make such forecasts. In the present work an inter comparison of gold price forecasting in Indian market is first done by employing a few classical Artificial Neural Network (ANN) techniques, namely Gradient Descent Method (GDM), Resilient Backpropagation method (RP), Scaled Conjugate Gradient method (SCG), Levenberg-Marquardt method (LM), Bayesian Regularization method (BR), One Step Secant method (OSS) and BFGS Quasi Newton method (BFG). Improvement in forecasting accuracy is achieved by proposing and developing a few modified GDM algorithms that incorporate different optimization functions by replacing the standard quadratic error function of classical GDM. Various optimization functions investigated in the present work are Mean median error function (MMD), Cauchy error function (CCY), Minkowski error function (MKW), Log cosh error function (LCH) and Negative logarithmic likelihood function (NLG). Modified algorithms incorporating these optimization functions are referred to here by GDM_MMD, GDM_CCY, GDM_KWK, GDM_LCH and GDM_NLG respectively. Gold price forecasting is then done by employing these algorithms and the results are analysed. The results of our study suggest that  the forecasting efficiency improves considerably on applying the modified methods proposed by us.