Short-Term Forecasting in Bitcoin Time Series Using LSTM and GRU RNNs

Abstract

In recent years, bitcoin has become a very attractive investment in financial industry, which is not controlled by governments, but is based on trust between transfers under the technology of block chain. Hence, forecasting future bitcoin cryptocurrency values is a problem that has attracted the attention of many researchers in the field, while proving to be a very challenging problem. This work presents an experimental analysis using LSTM and GRUs for forecasting bitcoin values in a minute-granulated time for the entire next day. To this end we also present our methodology for conducting the experiments. The final goal is to create the core of a financial prediction tool around the RNNs. In our experiments, we achieved interesting results such as a SMAPE of 0.0002, a RMSE of US$ 3.844 and a rRMSE of 0.0028 in a day where bitcoin rates vary from US$ 13.2K and US$ 14.6K, surpassing the results of SMAPE found in the literature and proposed limit of SMAPE smaller than 0.007 for forecasts.