Forecasting financial time series volatility using Particle Swarm Optimization trained Quantile Regression Neural Network

Accurate forecasting of volatility from financial time series is paramount in financial decision making. This paper presents a novel, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-trained Quantile Regression Neural Network namely PSOQRNN, to forecast volatility from financial time series. We compared the effectiveness of PSOQRNN with that of the traditional volatility forecasting models, i.e., Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) and three Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) including Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), General Regression Neural Network (GRNN), Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH), Random Forest (RF) and two Quantile Regression (QR)-based hybrids including Quantile Regression Neural Network (QRNN) and Quantile Regression Random Forest (QRRF). The results indicate that the proposed PSOQRNN outperformed these models in terms of Mean Squared Error (MSE), on a majority of the eight financial time series including exchange rates of USD versus JPY, GBP, EUR and INR, Gold Price, Crude Oil Price, Standard and Poor 500 (S&P 500) Stock Index and NSE India Stock Index considered here. It was corroborated by the DieboldMariano test of statistical significance. It also performed well in terms of other important measures such as Directional Change Statistic (Dstat) and Theil's Inequality Coefficient. The superior performance of PSOQRNN can be attributed to the role played by PSO in obtaining the better solutions. Therefore, we conclude that the proposed PSOQRNN can be used as a viable alternative in forecasting volatility. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.