Forecasting foreign exchange rates with an improved back-propagation learning algorithm with adaptive smoothing momentum terms

Abstract

The slow convergence of back-propagation neural network (BPNN) has become a challenge in data-mining and knowledge discovery applications due to the drawbacks of the gradient descent (GD) optimization method, which is widely adopted in BPNN learning. To solve this problem, some standard optimization techniques such as conjugate-gradient and Newton method have been proposed to improve the convergence rate of BP learning algorithm. This paper presents a heuristic method that adds an adaptive smoothing momentum term to original BP learning algorithm to speedup the convergence. In this improved BP learning algorithm, adaptive smoothing technique is used to adjust the momentums of weight updating formula automatically in terms of “3 σ limits theory.” Using the adaptive smoothing momentum terms, the improved BP learning algorithm can make the network training and convergence process faster, and the network’s generalization performance stronger than the standard BP learning algorithm can do. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed BP learning algorithm, three typical foreign exchange rates, British pound (GBP), Euro (EUR), and Japanese yen (JPY), are chosen as the forecasting targets for illustration purpose. Experimental results from homogeneous algorithm comparisons reveal that the proposed BP learning algorithm outperforms the other comparable BP algorithms in performance and convergence rate. Furthermore, empirical results from heterogeneous model comparisons also show the effectiveness of the proposed BP learning algorithm.