Stock market prediction using machine learning classifiers and social media, news

Abstract

Accurate stock market prediction is of great interest to investors; however, stock markets are driven by volatile factors such as microblogs and news that make it hard to predict stock market index based on merely the historical data. The enormous stock market volatility emphasizes the need to effectively assess the role of external factors in stock prediction. Stock markets can be predicted using machine learning algorithms on information contained in social media and financial news, as this data can change investors’ behavior. In this paper, we use algorithms on social media and financial news data to discover the impact of this data on stock market prediction accuracy for ten subsequent days. For improving performance and quality of predictions, feature selection and spam tweets reduction are performed on the data sets. Moreover, we perform experiments to find such stock markets that are difficult to predict and those that are more influenced by social media and financial news. We compare results of different algorithms to find a consistent classifier. Finally, for achieving maximum prediction accuracy, deep learning is used and some classifiers are ensembled. Our experimental results show that highest prediction accuracies of 80.53% and 75.16% are achieved using social media and financial news, respectively. We also show that New York and Red Hat stock markets are hard to predict, New York and IBM stocks are more influenced by social media, while London and Microsoft stocks by financial news. Random forest classifier is found to be consistent and highest accuracy of 83.22% is achieved by its ensemble.