Predicting Stock Prices Using Polynomial Classifiers: The Case of Dubai Financial Market

Predicting stock price movements is a challenging task for academicians and practitioners. In particular, forecasting price movements in emerging markets seems to be more elusive because they are usually more volatile often accompanied by thin trading-volumes and they are susceptible to more manipulation compared to mature markets. Technical analysis of stocks and commodities has become a science on its own; quantitative methods and techniques have been applied by many practitioners to forecast price movements. Lagging and sometimes leading technical indicators provide rich quantitative tools for traders and investors in their attempt to gain advantage when making investment or trading decisions. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been used widely in predicting stock prices because of their capability in capturing the non-linearity that often exists in price movements. Recently, Polynomial Classifiers (PC) have been applied to various recognition and classification application and showed favorable results in terms of recognition rates and computational complexity as compared to ANN. In this paper, we present two prediction models for predicting securities’ prices. The first model was developed using back propagation feed forward neural networks. The second model was developed using polynomial classifiers (PC), as a first time application for PC to be used in stock prices prediction. The inputs to both models were identical, and both models were trained and tested on the same data. The study was conducted on Dubai Financial Market as an emerging market and applied to two of the market’s leading stocks. In general, both models achieved very good results in terms of mean absolute error percentage. Both models show an average error around 1.5% predicting the next day price, an average error of 2.5% when predicting second day price, and an average error of 4% when predicted the third day price.