Evolving and clustering fuzzy decision tree for financial time series data forecasting

Stock price predictions have always been a subject of interest for investors and professional analysts. Nevertheless, determining the best time to buy or sell a stock remains very difficult because there are many factors that may influence the stock prices. This paper establishes a novel financial time series-forecasting model by evolving and clustering fuzzy decision tree for stocks in Taiwan Stock Exchange Corporation (TSEC). This forecasting model integrates a data clustering technique, a fuzzy decision tree (FDT), and genetic algorithms (GA) to construct a decision-making system based on historical data and technical indexes. The set of historical data is divided into k sub-clusters by adopting K-means algorithm. GA is then applied to evolve the number of fuzzy terms for each input index in FDT so the forecasting accuracy of the model can be further improved. A different forecasting model will be generated for each sub-cluster. In other words, the number of fuzzy terms in each sub-cluster will be different. Hit rate is applied as a performance measure and the proposed GAFDT model has the best performance of 82% average hit rate when compared with other approaches on various stocks in TSEC.