Predicting Cryptocurrency Returns Using Classification and Regression Machine Learning Models

Abstract

People are starting to see the cryptocurrency market as a viable source of income and investment, similar to the stock market, as the concept of cryptocurrencies continues to gain popularity. Predicting Bitcoin returns is related to financial machine learning, which uses time series to forecast price variance. This study starts with the daily close price of Bitcoin for its initial dataset. The price is transformed into percentages and binary classes, which categorize into “Up” and “Down”, after which a time series is applied to produce two datasets: a categorical dataset for classification and a numerical dataset for regression. For classification that represents a Binary classification in asset-price forecasting, k-fold cross-validation is applied to ensure that the best classifiers are selected for testing and analysis. Most of the regression analysis was based on visualization, which displayed the predicted prices by each regressor in front of the original values and helped analyze the models’ results more accurately. The outcomes of this study were achieved by anticipating bitcoin returns using classification and regression machine learning models, despite the approaches’ low accuracy and significant precision rate to the “Up” class. At this stage, with a significant limitation regarding the dataset and a lack of other indicators, a model capable of predicting future variations is considered a beneficial addition for many trading tools or even for crypto market analysts.