Comparative Study of Bitcoin Price Prediction

TL;DR

This study compares LSTM and GRU neural network models for Bitcoin price prediction, finding that GRUs outperform LSTMs in accuracy due to better handling of long-term dependencies in financial time series.

Contribution

It is the first comprehensive comparison of LSTM and GRU models for Bitcoin price forecasting using cross-validation and regularization techniques.

Findings

GRU models have lower MSE than LSTM models.

Regularization improves model performance.

GRUs better capture long-term dependencies in Bitcoin data.

Abstract

Prediction of stock prices has been a crucial and challenging task, especially in the case of highly volatile digital currencies such as Bitcoin. This research examineS the potential of using neural network models, namely LSTMs and GRUs, to forecast Bitcoin's price movements. We employ five-fold cross-validation to enhance generalization and utilize L2 regularization to reduce overfitting and noise. Our study demonstrates that the GRUs models offer better accuracy than LSTMs model for predicting Bitcoin's price. Specifically, the GRU model has an MSE of 4.67, while the LSTM model has an MSE of 6.25 when compared to the actual prices in the test set data. This finding indicates that GRU models are better equipped to process sequential data with long-term dependencies, a characteristic of financial time series data such as Bitcoin prices. In summary, our results provide valuable insights into the potential of neural network models for accurate Bitcoin price prediction and emphasize the importance of employing appropriate regularization techniques to enhance model performance.