Stock Price Forecasting in Presence of Covid-19 Pandemic and Evaluating Performances of Machine Learning Models for Time-Series Forecasting

With the heightened volatility in stock prices during the Covid-19 pandemic, the need for price forecasting has become more critical. We investigated the forecast performance of four models including Long-Short Term Memory, XGBoost, Autoregression, and Last Value on stock prices of Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, Google, and Apple in COVID-19 pandemic time to understand the accuracy and predictability of the models in this highly volatile time region. To train the models, the data of all stocks are split into train and test datasets. The test dataset starts from January 2020 to April 2021 which covers the COVID-19 pandemic period. The results show that the Autoregression and Last value models have higher accuracy in predicting the stock prices because of the strong correlation between the previous day and the next day's price value. Additionally, the results suggest that the machine learning models (Long-Short Term Memory and XGBoost) are not performing as well as Autoregression models when the market experiences high volatility.