Neural Networks for Financial Time Series Forecasting

Financial and economic time series forecasting has never been an easy task due to its sensibility to political, economic and social factors. For this reason, people who invest in financial markets and currency exchange are usually looking for robust models that can ensure them to maximize their profile and minimize their losses as much as possible. Fortunately, recently, various studies have speculated that a special type of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) called Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) could improve the predictive accuracy of the behavior of the financial data over time. This paper aims to forecast: (i) the closing price of eight stock market indexes; and (ii) the closing price of six currency exchange rates related to the USD, using the RNNs model and its variants: the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). The results show that the GRU gives the overall best results, especially for the univariate out-of-sample forecasting for the currency exchange rates and multivariate out-of-sample forecasting for the stock market indexes.