Development of 2D curve-fitting genetic/gene-expression programming technique for efficient time-series financial forecasting

Abstract

Stock market prediction is of immense interest to trading companies and buyers due to high profit margins. Therefore, precise prediction of the measure of increase or decrease of stock prices also plays an important role in buying/selling activities. This research presents a specialised extension to the genetic algorithms (GA) known as the genetic programming (GP) and gene expression programming (GEP) to explore and investigate the outcome of the GEP criteria on the stock market price prediction. The research presented in this paper aims at the modelling and prediction of short-to-medium term stock value fluctuations in the market via genetically tuned stock market parameters. The technique uses hierarchically defined GP and GEP techniques to tune algebraic functions representing the fittest equation for stock market activities. The proposed methodology is evaluated against five well-known stock market companies with each having its own trading circumstances during the past 20+ years. The proposed GEP/GP methodologies were evaluated based on variable window/population sizes, selection methods, and Elitism, Rank and Roulette selection methods. The Elitism-based approach showed promising results with a low error-rate in the resultant pattern matching with an overall accuracy of 93.46% for short-term 5-day and 92.105 for medium-term 56-day trading periods.