Hybrid deep learning model for enhanced short-term gold price forecasting

Abstract

Accurate short-term gold price forecasting is crucial for the financial decision-making. This paper introduces a short-term gold prediction network (STGP-Net), a novel hybrid deep learning model designed to enhance prediction accuracy by integrating one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM). STGP-Net leverages the 1D-CNN's ability to extract local temporal features and the LSTM capacity to model long-range dependencies within gold price time series. Various sliding window configurations are employed to generate input sequences for multi-step ahead prediction. Comprehensive experiments were conducted comparing STGP-Net against 1D-CNN + recurrent neural network (RNN) and 1D-CNN + bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) baseline models across three configurations using metrics like mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and determination (R²). The results demonstrated that STGP-Net consistently provided better performance and robustness, proving more effective for short-term gold price forecasting than the alternative hybrid models tested.