Metaheuristics optimized feedforward neural networks for efficient stock price prediction

The prediction of stock prices is an important task in economics, investment and making financial decisions. This has, for decades, spurred the interest of many researchers to make focused contributions to the design of accurate stock price predictive models; of which some have been utilized to predict the next day opening and closing prices of the stock indices. This paper proposes the design and implementation of a hybrid symbiotic organisms search trained feedforward neural network model for effective and accurate stock price prediction. The symbiotic organisms search algorithm is used as an efficient optimization technique to train the feedforward neural networks, while the resulting training process is used to build a better stock price prediction model. Furthermore, the study also presents a comparative performance evaluation of three different stock price forecasting models; namely, the particle swarm optimization trained feedforward neural network model, the genetic algorithm trained feedforward neural network model and the well-known ARIMA model. The system developed in support of this study utilizes sixteen stock indices as time series datasets for training and testing purpose. Three statistical evaluation measures are used to compare the results of the implemented models, namely the root mean squared error, the mean absolute percentage error and the mean absolution deviation. The computational results obtained reveal that the symbiotic organisms search trained feedforward neural network model exhibits outstanding predictive performance compared to the other models. However, the performance study shows that the three metaheuristics trained feedforward neural network models have promising predictive competence for solving problems of high dimensional nonlinear time series data, which are difficult to capture by traditional models.