Stock price development forecasting using neural networks

Stock price forecasting is highly important for the entire market economy as well as the investors themselves. However, stock prices develop in a non-linear way. It is therefore rather complicated to accurately forecast their development. A number of authors are now trying to find a suitable tool for forecasting the stock prices. One of such tools is undoubtedly artificial neural network, which have a potential of accurate forecast based even on non-linear data. The objective of this contribution is to use neural networks for forecasting the development of the CEZ, a. s. stock prices on the Prague Stock Exchange for the next 62 trading days. The data for the forecast have been obtained from the Prague Stock Exchange database. These are final prices at the end of each trading day when the company shares were traded, starting from the beginning of the year 2012 till September 2017. The data are processed by the Statistica software, generating multiple layer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) networks. In total, there are 10,000 neural network structures, out of which 5 with the best characteristics are retained. Using statistical interpretation of the results obtained, it was found that all retained networks are applicable in practice.