Stock trend prediction based on a new status box method and AdaBoost probabilistic support vector machine

Stock trend prediction is regarded as one of the most challenging tasks of financial time series prediction. Conventional statistical modeling techniques are not adequate for stock trend forecasting because of the non-stationarity and non-linearity of the stock market. With this regard, many machine learning approaches are used to improve the prediction results. These approaches mainly focus on two aspects: regression problem of the stock price and prediction problem of the turning points of stock price. In this paper, we concentrate on the evaluation of the current trend of stock price and the prediction of the change orientation of the stock price in future. Then, a new approach named status box method is proposed. Different from the prediction issue of the turning points, the status box method packages some stock points into three categories of boxes which indicate different stock status. And then, some machine learning techniques are used to classify these boxes so as to measure whether the states of each box coincides with the stock price trend and forecast the stock price trend based on the states of the box. These results would support us to make buying or selling strategies. Comparing with the turning points prediction that only considered the features of one day, each status box contains a certain amount of points which represent the stock price trend in a certain period of time. So, the status box reflects more information of stock market. To solve the classification problem of the status box, a special features construction approach is presented. Moreover, a new ensemble method integrated with the AdaBoost algorithm, probabilistic support vector machine (PSVM), and genetic algorithm (GA) is constructed to perform the status boxes classification. To verify the applicability and superiority of the proposed methods, 20 shares chosen from Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) and 16 shares from National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) are applied to perform stock trend prediction. The results show that the status box method not only have the better classification accuracy but also effectively solve the unbalance problem of the stock turning points classification. In addition, the new ensemble classifier achieves preferable profitability in simulation of stock investment and remarkably improves the classification performance compared with the approach that only uses the PSVM or back-propagation artificial neural network (BPN). (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.