An Efficient GAN-Based Multi-classification Approach for Financial Time Series Volatility Trend Prediction

Deep learning has achieved tremendous success in various applications owing to its robust feature representations of complex high-dimensional nonlinear data. Financial time-series prediction is no exception. Hence, the volatility trend prediction in financial time series (FTS) has been an active topic for several decades. Inspired by generative adversarial networks (GAN), which have been studied extensively in image processing and have achieved excellent results, we present the ordinal regression GAN for financial volatility trends (ORGAN-FVT) method for the end-to-end multi-classification task of FTS. An improved generative model based on convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) is proposed to capture temporal features effectively and mine the data distribution of volatility trends (short, neutral, and long) from given FTS data. Meanwhile, ordinal regression is leveraged for the discriminator to improve the multi-classification performance, making the model more practical. Finally, we empirically compare ORGAN-FVT with several state-of-the-art approaches on three real-world stock datasets: MICROSOFT(MSFT), Tesla(TSLA), and The People’s Insurance Company of China(PAICC). ORGAN-FVT demonstrated significantly better AUC and F1 scores, at most 20.81% higher than its competitors.