XgBoost Hyper-Parameter Tuning Using Particle Swarm Optimization for Stock Price Forecasting

Abstract

Investment in the capital market has become a lifestyle for millennials in Indonesia as seen from the increasing number of SID (Single Investor Identification) from 2.4 million in 2019 to 10.3 million in December 2022. The increase is due to various reasons, starting from the Covid-19 pandemic, which limited the space for social interaction and the easy way to invest in the capital market through various e-commerce platforms. These investors generally use fundamental and technical analysis to maximize profits and minimize the risk of loss in stock investment. These methods may lead to problem where subjectivity and different interpretation may appear in the process. Additionally, these methods are time consuming due to the need in the deep research on the financial statements, economic conditions and company reports. Machine learning by utilizing historical stock price data which is time-series data is one of the methods that can be used for the stock price forecasting. This paper proposed XGBoost optimized by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for stock price forecasting. XGBoost is known for its ability to make predictions accurately and efficiently. PSO is used to optimize the hyper-parameter values of XGBoost. The results of optimizing the hyper-parameter of the XGBoost algorithm using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method achieved the best performance when compared with standard XGBoost, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Random Forest. The results in RSME, MAE and MAPE shows the lowest values in the proposed method, which are, 0.0011, 0.0008, and 0.0772%, respectively. Meanwhile, the  reaches the highest value. It is seen that the PSO-optimized XGBoost is able to predict the stock price with a low error rate, and can be a promising model to be implemented for the stock price forecasting. This result shows the contribution of the proposed method.