Short-Term Financial Time Series Forecasting Integrating Principal Component Analysis and Independent Component Analysis with Support Vector Regression

Abstract

Financial time series forecasting could be beneficial for individual as well as institutional investors. But, the high noise and complexity residing in the financial data make this job extremely challenging. Over the years, many researchers have used support vector regression (SVR) quite successfully to conquer this challenge. In this paper, an SVR based forecasting model is proposed which first uses the principal component analysis (PCA) to extract the low-dimensional and efficient feature information, and then uses the independent component analysis (ICA) to preprocess the extracted features to nullify the influence of noise in the features. Experiments were carried out based on 16 years’ historical data of three prominent stocks from three different sectors listed in Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE), Bangladesh. The predictions were made for 1 to 4 days in advance targeting the short term prediction. For comparison, the integration of PCA with SVR (PCA-SVR), ICA with SVR (ICA-SVR) and single SVR approaches were applied to evaluate the prediction accuracy of the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the proposed model (PCA-ICA-SVR) outperforms the PCA-SVR, ICA-SVR and single SVR methods.