Forecasting stock price using Nonlinear independent component analysis and support vector regression

In developing a stock price forecasting model, the first step is usually feature extraction. Nonlinear independent component analysis (NLICA) is a novel feature extraction technique to find independent sources given only observed data that are mixtures of the unknown sources, without prior knowledge of the mixing mechanisms. It assumes that the observed mixtures are the nonlinear combination of latent source signals. This study propose a stock price forecasting model which first uses NLICA as preprocessing to extract features from forecasting variables. The features, called independent components (ICs), are served as the inputs of support vector regression (SVR) to build the prediction model. Experimental results on Nikkei 225 closing cash index show that the proposed method can produce the best prediction performance compared to the SVR models that use linear ICA, principal component analysis (PCA) and kernel PCA as feature extraction, and the single SVR model without feature extraction.