ANN Model to Predict Stock Prices at Stock Exchange Markets
This addresses the problem of inaccurate stock price predictions for stockbrokers and investors, but it is incremental as it applies an existing neural network method to financial data.
The research tackled stock price prediction by developing an artificial neural network model, achieving a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) between 0.71% and 2.77% on data from stock markets like Nairobi Securities Exchange and New York Stock Exchange.
Stock exchanges are considered major players in financial sectors of many countries. Most Stockbrokers, who execute stock trade, use technical, fundamental or time series analysis in trying to predict stock prices, so as to advise clients. However, these strategies do not usually guarantee good returns because they guide on trends and not the most likely price. It is therefore necessary to explore improved methods of prediction. The research proposes the use of Artificial Neural Network that is feedforward multi-layer perceptron with error backpropagation and develops a model of configuration 5:21:21:1 with 80% training data in 130,000 cycles. The research develops a prototype and tests it on 2008-2012 data from stock markets e.g. Nairobi Securities Exchange and New York Stock Exchange, where prediction results show MAPE of between 0.71% and 2.77%. Validation done with Encog and Neuroph realized comparable results. The model is thus capable of prediction on typical stock markets.