Wavelet Thresholding Techniques to Support Multi-Scale Decomposition for Financial Forecasting Systems

Detecting the features of significant patterns from their own historical data is so much crucial to good performance specially in time-series forecasting. Recently, a new data filtering method (or multi-scale decomposition) such as wavelet analysis is considered more useful for handling the time-series that contain strong quasi-cyclical components than other methods. The reason is that wavelet analysis theoretically makes much better local information according to different time intervals from the filtered data. Wavelets can process information effectively at different scales. This implies inherent support fer multiresolution analysis, which correlates with time series that exhibit self-similar behavior across different time scales. The specific local properties of wavelets can for example be particularly useful to describe signals with sharp spiky, discontinuous or fractal structure in financial markets based on chaos theory and also allows the removal of noise-dependent high frequencies, while conserving the signal bearing high frequency terms of the signal. To date, the existing studies related to wavelet analysis are increasingly being applied to many different fields. In this study, we focus on several wavelet thresholding criteria or techniques to support multi-signal decomposition methods for financial time series forecasting and apply to forecast Korean Won / U.S. Dollar currency market as a case study. One of the most important problems that has to be solved with the application of the filtering is the correct choice of the filter types and the filter parameters. If the threshold is too small or too large then the wavelet shrinkage estimator will tend to overfit or underfit the data. It is often selected arbitrarily or by adopting a certain theoretical or statistical criteria. Recently, new and versatile techniques have been introduced related to that problem. Our study is to analyze thresholding or filtering methods based on wavelet analysis that use multi-signal decomposition algorithms within the neural network architectures specially in complex financial markets. Secondly, through the comparison with different filtering techniques' results we introduce the present different filtering criteria of wavelet analysis to support the neural network learning optimization and analyze the critical issues related to the optimal filter design problems in wavelet analysis. That is, those issues include finding the optimal filter parameter to extract significant input features for the forecasting model. Finally, from existing theory or experimental viewpoint concerning the criteria of wavelets thresholding parameters we propose the design of the optimal wavelet for representing a given signal useful in forecasting models, specially a well known neural network models.