Prediction of Stock Price Using Statistical and Ensemble learning Models: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Prediction of the stock price has always been a challenging task due to irregular patterns of the market. Uncertainty has made researchers think of some new and robust predictive methods. Many studies are available in the literature, with many models to predict the stock price accurately. Statistical, machine learning, deep learning, and other related approaches can create a predictive model. ARIMA model is the most commonly used statistical model for time series prediction. But ensemble learning techniques have not been explored much to predict future stock price. So, the present study stresses comparing statistical methods with ensemble learning methods. This paper compares the ARIMA, Random Forest, and Extreme Gradient Boosting models based on root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The subject chosen is Google’s stocks, and the data used is from NASDAQ stock exchange. The analysis results show that the ARIMA model performed fairly well for short-term predictions but relatively high MAPE value. The extreme gradient boosting model gave the best performance with the lowest RMSE and MAPE value. Hence, it is evident that after proper hyperparameter tuning, ensemble learning techniques can be used to create robust stock price-prediction models.