Hybrid Deep Learning Models For Gold Price Prediction: Enhancing Forecast In Volatile Financial Markets

Abstract

Gold is viewed as an investment that will remain valuable over the long term and as an investment that will hedge against inflation; however, the volatility of its price in the short term necessitates the use of effective forecasting techniques for investment decisions. This research uses a Hybrid Deep Learning technique, by predicting the price of gold using historical time series data with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model. The model was tested with batch sizes of 16, 32, and 64 using the Adam optimizer with a learning rate of 0.0001 and dropout of 0.2. This research provides an indication of the extent to which gold price forecasting, at least from a financial forecasting perspective, can be achieved using a hybrid model of CNN and LSTM, as it showed the capability to detect short-term trends and long-term sequential gaps in gold price series. The experimental results show out of several performed analyses on the CNN-LSTM model, the one with a batch of 16 showed the best performance as it achieved  an RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) of 11.518535% which implies there was great closeness between the actual gold price and the predicted gold price