A Comparative Study of Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural Network for Option Price Prediction

Abstract

Option pricing has become one of the quite important parts of the financial market. As the market is always dynamic, it is really difficult to predict the option price accurately. For this reason, various machine learning techniques have been designed and developed to deal with the problem of predicting the future trend of option price. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models for the prediction of option price. Both models are tested with a benchmark publicly available dataset namely SPY option price-2015 in both testing and training phases. The converted data through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used in both models to achieve better prediction accuracy. On the other hand, the entire dataset is partitioned into two groups of training (70%) and test sets (30%) to avoid overfitting problem. The outcomes of the SVM model are compared with those of the ANN model based on the root mean square errors (RMSE). It is demonstrated by the experimental results that the ANN model performs better than the SVM model, and the predicted option prices are in good agreement with the corresponding actual option prices.