Stock Market Forecasting Based on Text Mining Technology: A Support Vector Machine Method

TL;DR

This study employs text mining and sentiment analysis on Chinese financial news to predict stock market trends using SVM, demonstrating the significant influence of news and optimizing model parameters for better forecasting accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SVM-based forecasting model with two-parameter optimization and a method to calculate the financial source impact factor, specifically tailored for Chinese stock market data.

Findings

News significantly influences stock market movements.

SVR models fit stock fluctuations well with minimal time lag.

News impact on stocks is less than two days.

Abstract

News items have a significant impact on stock markets but the ways are obscure. Many previous works have aimed at finding accurate stock market forecasting models. In this paper, we use text mining and sentiment analysis on Chinese online financial news, to predict Chinese stock tendency and stock prices based on support vector machine (SVM). Firstly, we collect 2,302,692 news items, which date from 1/1/2008 to 1/1/2015. Secondly, based on this dataset, a specific domain stop-word dictionary and a precise sentiment dictionary are formed. Thirdly, we propose a forecasting model using SVM. On the algorithm of SVM implementation, we also propose two-parameter optimization algorithms to search for the best initial parameter setting. The result shows that parameter G has the main effect, while parameter C's effect is not obvious. Furthermore, support vector regression (SVR) models for different Chinese stocks are similar whereas in support vector classification (SVC) models best parameters are quite differential. Series of contrast experiments show that: a) News has significant influence on stock market; b) Expansion input vector for additional situations when that day has no news data is better than normal input in SVR, yet is worse in SVC; c) SVR shows a fantastic degree of fitting in predicting stock fluctuation while such result has some time lag; d) News effect time lag for stock market is less than two days; e) In SVC, historic stock data has a most efficient time lag which is about 10 days, whereas in SVR this effect is not obvious. Besides, based on the special structure of the input vector, we also design a method to calculate the financial source impact factor. Result suggests that the news quality and audience number both have a significant effect on the source impact factor. Besides, for Chinese investors, traditional media has more influence than digital media.