Optimizing LSTM Based Network For Forecasting Stock Market

In this modern era, the financial market, more specifically, the stock markets all over the world, deal with an enormous amount of real-time data that facilitates the data analytics and prediction in the field of finance. The main objective of this paper is to propose a novel model of neural network based on Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and utilizing one of the most powerful evolutionary algorithms, namely the Differential Evolution (DE), to forecast the next day’s stock price of a company. This study focuses on optimizing the ten network hyperparameters related to the detection of temporal patterns of a given dataset, namely, the size of the time window, batch size, the number of LSTM units in hidden layers, the number of hidden layers (LSTM and dense), dropout coefficient for each layer, and the network training optimization algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that all this set of parameters have been optimized simultaneously. Then, the LSTM has been optimized by DE to gain the lower root mean squared error (RMSE) for prediction. The proposed model achieved 8.092 RMSE as its objective value, which is better in comparison with the best statistical forecasting models such as NAIVE, ETS, and SARIMA, which are the-state-of-the-art methods in this filed. Moreover, for shortening the training time as the main source of computational expensiveness, the proposed method works with a lower number of epochs. By this way, DE tries to find a shallower and faster network even with higher accuracy, which is a remarkable approach.