Prediction of Highly Volatile Cryptocurrency Prices Using Social Media

Abstract

Trading cryptocurrencies (digital currencies) are currently performed by applying methods similar to what is applied to the stock market or commodities; however, these algorithms are not necessarily well-suited for predicting cryptocurrency prices. Unlike stock exchanges, which shut down for several hours or days at a time, digital currency prediction and trading seem to be of a more consistent and predictable nature. In this work, we benefit from sentiment analysis of tweets using both an existing sentiment analysis package and a manually tailored "objective analysis,"to calculate one impact value for each analysis every 15min. We then select the most appropriate training method by applying evolutionary techniques and discover the best subset of the generated features to include, as well as other parameters. One of the unique contributions of this work is the analysis of both English and Japanese tweets with a tailored "objective analysis"tool. This resulted in implementation of predictors which yielded 28% to 122% profit in a four-week simulation, much more than simply holding a digital currency for the same period of time.