Application of wrapper approach and composite classifier to the stock trend prediction

The research on the stock market prediction has been more popular in recent years. Numerous researchers tried to predict the immediate future stock prices or indices based on technical indices with various mathematical models and machine learning techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM) and ARIMA models. Although some researches in the literature exhibit satisfactory prediction achievement when the average percentage error and root mean square error are used as the performance metrics, the prediction accuracy of whether stock market goes or down is seldom analyzed. This paper employs wrapper approach to select the optimal feature subset from original feature set composed of 23 technical indices and then uses voting scheme that combines different classification algorithms to predict the trend in Korea and Taiwan stock markets. Experimental result shows that wrapper approach can achieve better performance than the commonly used feature filters, such as χ2-Statistic, Information gain, ReliefF, Symmetrical uncertainty and CFS. Moreover, the proposed voting scheme outperforms single classifier such as SVM, kth nearest neighbor, back-propagation neural network, decision tree, and logistic regression.