Prediction of the direction of stock prices by machine learning techniques

Prediction of a stock price has been a subject of interest for a long time in financial markets, and thus, many studies have been conducted in various directions. As the efficient market hypothesis introduced in the 1970s acquired supports, it came to be the majority opinion that it was impossible to predict stock prices. However, recent advances in predictive models have led to new attempts to predict the future prices. Here, we summarize past studies on the price prediction by evaluation measures, and predict the direction of stock prices of Samsung Electronics, LG Chem, and NAVER by applying various machine learning models. In addition to widely used technical indicator variables, accounting indicators such as Price Earning Ratio and Price Book-value Ratio and outputs of the hidden Markov Model are used as predictors. From the results of our analysis, we conclude that no models show significantly better accuracy and it is not possible to predict the direction of stock prices with models used. Considering that the models with extra predictors show relatively high test accuracy, we may expect the possibility of a meaningful improvement in prediction accuracy if proper variables that reflect the opinions and sentiments of investors would be utilized.