Integration of artificial neural networks and fuzzy Delphi for stock market forecasting

The stock market, which has been investigated by various researchers, is a very complicated environment. So far, most of the research only concerned the quantitative factors, like index in open or volume, instead of qualitative factors, say political effect. However, the latter always plays a very important role in the stock market environment. Therefore, this research proposes an intelligent stock market forecasting system which considers the quantitative factors as well as the qualitative factors. Basically, the proposed system consists of (1) factors collection, (2) quantitative model (i.e., artificial neural network), (3) qualitative model (i.e., fuzzy Delphi), and (4) decision integration (i.e., artificial neural network). An example based on the Taiwan stock market is shown to evaluate the proposed intelligent system.