Stock Market Forecasting : Comparison between Artificial Neural Networks and Arch Models

Data mining is the process of searching and analyzing large quantities of data for finding out meaningful patterns and rules. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is one of the tools of data mining which is becoming very popular in forecasting the future values. Some of the areas where it is used are banking, medicine, retailing and fraud detection. In finance, artificial neural network is used in various disciplines including stock market forecasting. In the stock market time series, due to high volatility, it is very important to choose a model which reads volatility and forecasts the future values considering volatility as one of the major attributes for forecasting. In this paper, an attempt is made to develop two models - one using feed forward back propagation Artificial Neural Network and the other using Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) technique for forecasting stock market returns. Various parameters which are considered for the design of optimal ANN model development are input and output data normalization, transfer function and neuron/s at input, hidden and output layers, number of hidden layers, values with respect to momentum, learning rate and error tolerance. Simulations have been done using prices of daily close of Sensex. Stock market returns are chosen as input data and output is the forecasted return. Simulations of the Model have been done using MATLAB$^{(R)}$ 6.1.0.450 and EViews 4.1. Convergence and performance of models have been evaluated on the basis of the simulation results. Performance evaluation is done on the basis of the errors calculated between the actual and predicted values.