Predicting Stock Liquidity by Using Ensemble Data Mining Methods

In finance literature, stock liquidity showing how stocks can be cashed out in the market has received rich attentions from both academicians and practitioners. The reasons are plenty. First, it is known that stock liquidity affects significantly asset pricing. Second, macroeconomic announcements influence liquidity in the stock market. Therefore, stock liquidity itself affects investors' decision and managers' decision as well. Though there exist a great deal of literature about stock liquidity in finance literature, it is quite clear that there are no studies attempting to investigate the stock liquidity issue as one of decision making problems. In finance literature, most of stock liquidity studies had dealt with limited views such as how much it influences stock price, which variables are associated with describing the stock liquidity significantly, etc. However, this paper posits that stock liquidity issue may become a serious decision-making problem, and then be handled by using data mining techniques to estimate its future extent with statistical validity. In this sense, we collected financial data set from a number of manufacturing companies listed in KRX (Korea Exchange) during the period of 2010 to 2013. The reason why we selected dataset from 2010 was to avoid the after-shocks of financial crisis that occurred in 2008. We used Fn-GuidPro system to gather total 5,700 financial data set. Stock liquidity measure was computed by the procedures proposed by Amihud (2002) which is known to show best metrics for showing relationship with daily return. We applied five data mining techniques (or classifiers) such as Bayesian network, support vector machine (SVM), decision tree, neural network, and ensemble method. Bayesian networks include GBN (General Bayesian Network), NBN (Naive BN), TAN (Tree Augmented NBN). Decision tree uses CART and C4.5. Regression result was used as a benchmarking performance. Ensemble method uses two types-integration of two classifiers, and three classifiers. Ensemble method is based on voting for the sake of integrating classifiers. Among the single classifiers, CART showed best performance with 48.2%, compared with 37.18% by regression. Among the ensemble methods, the result from integrating TAN, CART, and SVM was best with 49.25%. Through the additional analysis in individual industries, those relatively stabilized industries like electronic appliances, wholesale & retailing, woods, leather-bags-shoes showed better performance over 50%.