Stock Price Prediction of Walmart Based on Combination of SVM and LS-SVM Models

Abstract

One of the most significant operations in the finance sector is stock trading. The stock market is an essential part in the economy of a country and serves as the indicators of the situation of a country’s economy as the stock prices go up or down. Therefore, stock price prediction, the behavior of attempting to predict the potential worth of a corporation or any financial instruments successfully, will maximize investor’s gain, enhance market’s confidence, and help government policymakers to make economic decisions. In order to forecast the price of a stock, a machine learning approach is constructed in this study. The suggested algorithm includes random forest, support vector machine (SVM), and least square support vector machine (LS-SVM). In particular, the random forest is employed to select the most important features from the technical indicators calculated for stock price prediction. The SVM and the LS-SVM models are employed to predict the daily stock prices. Besides, R-Squared (R²), mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) are used for model evaluation. According to the results, both SVM and LS-SVM models can predict stock price well, but both algorithms are not suitable for large datasets, and overfitting problem exists. These results shed light on guiding further exploration of stock price predictions.