An improved convolutional recurrent neural network for stock price forecasting

Abstract

Stock price forecasting is a challenging area of research, particularly due to the complexity and unpredictability of financial markets. The accuracy of prediction models is influenced by various factors, including nonlinearity, seasonality, and economic shocks. Deep learning has demonstrated better forecasts of stock prices than traditional approaches. This study, therefore, proposed a new approach to improve forecasting system based on an end-to-end convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) with attention mechanism. Our approach first investigates local stock price features using 1D convolutional neural network, and then employs a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network for forecasting. This model stands out by effectively utilizing contextual data and representing the temporal character of data. The Bi-LSTM is helpful for understanding the history and future contextual information since it uncovers both past and future contexts of stock data. Furthermore, integrating attention mechanism within the CRNN represents a significant improvement. This allows our model to handle long input sequences more effectively and capture the inherent stochasticity in stock prices, which is often missed by traditional models. The effectiveness of our approach is investigated using data on 10 stock indexes from Yahoo Finance. The results show that our method outperforms ARIMA, LSTM, and conventional methods.