Learning Optimal Q-Function Using Deep Boltzmann Machine for Reliable Trading of Cryptocurrency

Abstract

The explosive price volatility from the end of 2017 to January 2018 shows that bitcoin is a high risk asset. The deep reinforcement algorithm is straightforward idea for directly outputs the market management actions to achieve higher profit instead of higher price-prediction accuracy. However, existing deep reinforcement learning algorithms including Q-learning are also limited to problems caused by enormous searching space. We propose a combination of double Q-network and unsupervised pre-training using Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM) to generate and enhance the optimal Q-function in cryptocurrency trading. We obtained the profit of 2,686% in simulation, whereas the best conventional model had that of 2,087% for the same period of test. In addition, our model records 24% of profit while market price significantly drops by −64%.