Abstract
Predicting stock market prices is an important and interesting task in academic and financial research. The volatile nature of the stock market means that predicting stock market prices is a challenging task. However, recent advancements in machine learning, especially in deep learning techniques, have made it possible for researchers to use such techniques to predict future stock trends based on historical financial data, social media news, financial news, and stock technical indicators (STIs). This work focused on the prediction of closing stock prices based on using ten years of Yahoo Finance data of ten renowned stocks and STIs by using 1D DenseNet and an autoencoder. The calculated STIs were first used as the input for the autoencoder for dimensionality reduction, resulting in less correlation between the STIs. These STIs, along with the Yahoo finance data, were then fed into the 1D DenseNet. The resultant features obtained from the 1D DenseNet were then used as input for the softmax layer residing inside the 1D DenseNet framework for the prediction of closing stock prices for short-, medium-, and long-term perspectives. Based on the predicted trends of the stock prices, our model presented the user with one of three suggested signals, i.e., buy, sell, or hold. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach outperformed the state-of-the-art techniques by obtaining a minimum MAPE value of 0.41.