Effective short-term forecasts of Saudi stock price trends using technical indicators and large-scale multivariate time series

Forecasting the stock market trend and movement is a challenging task due to multiple factors, including the stock’s natural volatility and nonlinearity. It concerns discovering the market’s hidden patterns with respect to time to enable proactive decision-making and better futuristic insights. Recurrent neural network-based methods have been a prime candidate for solving complex and nonlinear sequences, including the task of modeling multivariate time series forecasts. Due to the lack of comprehensive and reference work in short-term forecasts for the Saudi stock price and trends, this article introduces a comprehensive and accurate forecasting methodology tailored to the Saudi stock market. Two steps were configured to render effective short-term forecasts. First, a custom-built feature engineering streamline was constructed to preprocess the raw stock data and enable financial-related technical indicators, followed by a stride-based sliding window to produce multivariate time series data ready for the modeling phase. Second, a well-architected Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model was constructed and carefully calibrated to yield accurate multi-step forecasts, which was trained using the recently published historical multivariate time-series data from the primary Saudi stock market index (TASI index), in addition to being benchmarked against a suitable baseline model, namely Vector Autoregression Moving-Average with Exogenous Regressors (VARMAX). The output predictions from the proposed GRU model and the VARMAX model were evaluated using a set of regression-based metrics to assess and interpret the model precision. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed methodology yields outstanding short-term forecasts of the Saudi stock price trends price compared to existing efforts related to this work.