Hybrid Machine Learning Model for Predicting NASDAQ Composite Index

Financial markets are dynamic and open systems. They are subject to the influence of environmental changes. For this reason, predicting stock market prices is a difficult task for investors due to the volatility of the financial stock markets nature. Stock market forecasting leads investors to make decisions with more confidence based on the prediction of stock market price behavior. Indeed, a lot of analysts are greatly focused in the research domain of stock market prediction. Generally, the stock market prediction tools are categorized into two types of algorithms: (1) linear models like Auto Regressive (AR), Moving Average (MA), Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), and (2) non-linear models like Autoregressive Conditionally Heteroscedastic (ARCH), Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) and recently Neural Network (NN)). This paper aspires to crucially predict the stock index movement for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) based on deep learning networks. We propose a hybrid stock price prediction model using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for feature selection and Neural Network models to perform the task of prediction. To evaluate the performance of the proposed models, we use five regression evaluation metrics: Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and R-Square (R2), and the Execution Time (ET) metric to calculate the necessary time for running each hybrid model. The results reveal that error rates in the CNN-BGRU model are found to be lower compared to CNN-GRU, CNN-LSTM, CNN-BLSTM and the the existing hybrid models. This research work produces a practical experience for decision makers on financial time series data.