Effectiveness of Using Candlestick Charts to Forecast Ethereum Price Direction: A Machine Learning Approach

Cryptocurrency is a form of decentralized digital currency. Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and the largest altcoin. Cryptocurrencies including Ethereum are highly volatile. Hence, shortterm directional forecasts in the cryptocurrency market have become a widely discussing topic. Candlestick charts are useful visualizations of the open, high, low and close prices which can identify patterns and gauge the near-term direction of prices. This research explores the effectiveness of forecasting hourly Ethereum closing price direction based on candlestick charts within a short time horizon. The proposed forecasting algorithm incorporates clustering methods such as fuzzy K-means, K-means and partition around medoids clustering to cluster candlestick chart properties namely upper shadow length, body length and lower shadow length. Classification methods such as random forest, support vector machine and K-nearest neighbour were used to forecast closing price direction using 16 different predictor variable sets including open, high, low and close prices, candlestick chart price direction, USL, BL and LSL. The accuracy for all considered cases was around 50%. Clustering improved the accuracy slightly and including the CPD with the predictor variable sets under consideration can increase the accuracy slightly. However, this approach is performing better in predicting the Down cases to the total number of actual Down cases because there is a higher sensitivity of 81.20% based on the SVM with Open, High, Low and Close at t in the clustering ignored method.