Predicting stock and stock price index movement using Trend Deterministic Data Preparation and machine learning techniques

Four machine learning algorithms are used for prediction in stock markets.Focus is on data pre-processing to improve the prediction accuracy.Technical indicators are discretised by exploiting the inherent opinion.Prediction accuracy of algorithms increases when discrete data is used. This paper addresses problem of predicting direction of movement of stock and stock price index for Indian stock markets. The study compares four prediction models, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), random forest and naive-Bayes with two approaches for input to these models. The first approach for input data involves computation of ten technical parameters using stock trading data (open, high, low & close prices) while the second approach focuses on representing these technical parameters as trend deterministic data. Accuracy of each of the prediction models for each of the two input approaches is evaluated. Evaluation is carried out on 10years of historical data from 2003 to 2012 of two stocks namely Reliance Industries and Infosys Ltd. and two stock price indices CNX Nifty and S&P Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) Sensex. The experimental results suggest that for the first approach of input data where ten technical parameters are represented as continuous values, random forest outperforms other three prediction models on overall performance. Experimental results also show that the performance of all the prediction models improve when these technical parameters are represented as trend deterministic data.