Incorporating Sentiment and Temporal Information for Bitcoin Price Prediction

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of bitcoin as the first digital currency. Considering the advantages of bitcoin for both individuals and society, the price prediction of bitcoin is a hot topic. However, there remain two main challenges to be addressed in this task. Firstly, because bitcoin is vulnerable to the attitudes of the investors, incorporating the sentiment semantics from the social media into the prediction is challenging. Secondly, it is intractable to predict extreme volatility of the bitcoin price. To tackle the above challenges, this paper proposes to incorporate sentiment and temporal information simultaneously. For the first challenge, this paper employs external unsupervised corpus to conduct the domain-specific post-pretraining on the off-the-shelf language model. And the sentiment analysis on the tweets is done to obtain the scores. For the second one, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network is leveraged to joint model the temporal price data and the sentiment scores, thus deriving the final predictions. Experiments on the real data show that compared with the single-layer LSTM model, the model in this paper works better, which provides help for investors to specify trading strategies and also provides implications for government agencies that are developing digital currencies.