A Novel Approach for Stock Price Prediction Using Gradient Boosting Machine with Feature Engineering (GBM-wFE)

Abstract

The prediction of stock prices has become an exciting area for researchers as well as academicians due to its economic impact and potential business profits. This study proposes a novel multiclass classification ensemble learning approach for predicting stock prices based on historical data using feature engineering. The proposed approach comprises four main steps, which are pre-processing, feature selection, feature engineering, and ensemble methods. We use 11 datasets from Nasdaq and S&P 500 to ensure the accuracy of the proposed approach. Furthermore, eight feature selection algorithms are studied and implemented. More importantly, a feature engineering concept is applied to construct two new features, which are appears to be very auspicious in terms of improving classification accuracy, and this is considered the first study to use feature engineering for multiclass classification using ensemble methods. Finally, seven ensemble machine learning (ML) algorithms are used and compared to discover the ultimate collaboration prediction model. Besides, the best feature selection algorithm is proposed. This study proposes a novel multiclass classification approach called Gradient Boosting Machine with Feature Engineering (GBM-wFE) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as the feature selection. We find that GBM-wFE outperforms the previous studies and the overall prediction results are auspicious, as MAPE of 0.0406% is achieved, which is considered the best result compared to the available studies in the literature.