With the development of our country's financial market, people pay more attention to the stock market return forecast, which can bring the investors a lot of income and also become a tool of risk management. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly sophisticated and have achieved amazing results in many fields. Machine learning and deep learning algorithm models can process huge amounts of data, from which they can quickly process and analyze laws, many scholars try to apply various machine learning models to the financial field. This paper first expounds the theoretical basis of stock market return prediction, and summarizes the main literature in this field in recent years, from the traditional stock prediction model to the machine learning prediction model. Finally, the traditional stock prediction model ARIMA model and the deep learning LSTM neural network model are selected for comparative empirical research. The sample data are from the Tushare big data community, taking the new energy vehicle stock BYD (002594) as an example. The empirical results show that the prediction accuracy and stability of LSTM neural network are far higher than ARIMA model, and it will have broad application prospects in financial prediction and other fields in the future.