Forecasting Stock Index Movement: A Comparison of Support Vector Machines and Random Forest

Abstract

There exists vast research articles which predict the stock market as well pricing of stock index financial instruments but most of the proposed models focus on the accurate forecasting of the levels (i.e. value) of the underlying stock index. There is a lack of studies examining the predictability of the direction/sign of stock index movement. Given the notion that a prediction with little forecast error does not necessarily translate into capital gain, this study is an attempt to predict the direction of S&P CNX NIFTY Market Index of the National Stock Exchange, one of the fastest growing financial exchanges in developing Asian countries. Random forest and Support Vector Machines (SVM) are very specific type of machine learning method, and are promising tools for the prediction of financial time series. The tested classification models, which predict direction, include linear discriminant analysis, logit, artificial neural network, random forest and SVM. Empirical experimentation suggests that the SVM outperforms the other classification methods in terms of predicting the direction of the stock market movement and random forest method outperforms neural network, discriminant analysis and logit model used in this study.