Stock market value prediction using neural networks

Neural networks, as an intelligent data mining method, have been used in many different challenging pattern recognition problems such as stock market prediction. However, there is no formal method to determine the optimal neural network for prediction purpose in the literature. In this paper, two kinds of neural networks, a feed forward multi layer Perceptron (MLP) and an Elman recurrent network, are used to predict a company´s stock value based on its stock share value history. The experimental results show that the application of MLP neural network is more promising in predicting stock value changes rather than Elman recurrent network and linear regression method. However, based on the standard measures that will be presented in the paper we find that the Elman recurrent network and linear regression can predict the direction of the changes of the stock value better than the MLP.