Intelligent Financial Forecasting With an Improved Chemical Reaction Optimization Algorithm Based Dendritic Neuron Model

Chemical reaction optimization (CRO) algorithm is a robust metaheuristic by simulating the process of natural chemical reaction and has been applied for solving numerous realistic problems. However, it is suffering from low population diversity, slow convergence, and deprived from local search ability. To boost the search operation of CRO, this article proposes an improved CRO method termed as ICRO. We achieve the improvements in two phases. First, to start the search operation with a better-quality population, we propose a new method to initialize population which helps in enhancing diversification of the search space. Second, to intensify the local search ability we integrate Nelder-Mead simplex method with CRO. The ICRO is then evaluated on a few benchmark functions for optimization and found apposite. Dendritic neuron model (DNM) using additive and multiplicative-based aggregation functions has been emerging as a machine learning approach and found successful in many engineering applications. This study attempts to advance the predictive accuracy of DNM through maintaining a decent steadiness between exploitation and exploration of its search space with the proposed ICRO, termed as ICRO-DNM. The powerful global search ability of ICRO synergies with better approximation capability of DNM thus, able to overcome the limitations of conventional back propagation learning based DNM. ICRO-DNM is evaluated on closing price prediction for four stock index and net asset values of four mutual fund datasets and found efficient. The consequences of this attempt are: 1) Proposed ICRO shows robust parameter optimization ability for benchmark functions and DNM compared to basic CRO, particle swarm optimization (PSO), and genetic algorithm (GA) and 2) The learning paradigm formed due to reasonable amalgamation of ICRO and DNM is pretty able to capture the underlying uncertainties coupled with financial data, produces more precise and steady predictions and significantly different from other forecasts.