News-based intelligent prediction of financial markets using text mining and machine learning: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners have attempted to predict the financial market by analyzing textual (e.g., news articles and social media) and numeric data (e.g., hourly stock prices, and moving averages). Among textual data, while many papers have been published that analyze social media, news content has gained limited attention in predicting the stock market. Acknowledging that news is critical in predicting the stock market, the focus of this systematic review is on papers investigating machine learning and text mining techniques to predict the stock market using news. Using Kitchenham’s methodology, we present a systematic review of the literature on intelligent financial market prediction, examining data mining and machine learning approaches and the employed datasets. From five digital libraries, we identified 61 studies from 2015–2022 for synthesis and interpretation. We present notable gaps and barriers to predicting financial markets, then recommend future research scopes. Various input data, including numerical (stock prices and technical indicators) and textual data (news text and sentiment), have been employed for news-based stock market prediction. News data collection can be costly and time-consuming: most studies have used custom crawlers to gather news articles; however, there are financial news databases available that could significantly facilitate news collection. Furthermore, although most datasets have covered fewer than 100K records, deep learning and more sophisticated artificial neural networks can process enormous datasets faster, improving future model performance. There is a growing trend toward using artificial neural networks, particularly recurrent neural networks and deep learning models, from 2018 to 2021. Furthermore, regression and gradient-boosting models have been developed for stock market prediction during the last four years. Although word embedding approaches for feature representation have been employed recently with good accuracy, emerging language models may be a focus for future research. Advanced natural language processing methods like transformers have undeniably contributed to intelligent stock market prediction. However, stock market prediction has not yet taken full advantage of them.