Mixture of Activation Functions With Extended Min-Max Normalization for Forex Market Prediction

An accurate exchange rate forecasting and its decision-making to buy or sell are critical issues in the Forex market. Short-term currency rate forecasting is a challenging task due to its inherent characteristics, which include high volatility, trend, noise, and market shocks. We propose a novel deep learning architecture consisting of an adaptive activation function selection mechanism to achieve higher predictive accuracy. The proposed architecture is composed of seven neural networks that have different activation functions as well as softmax layer and multiplication layer with a skip connection, which are used to generate the dynamic importance weights that decide which activation function is preferred. In addition, we introduce an extended Min-Max smoothing technique to further normalize financial time series that have non-stationary properties. In our experimental evaluation, the results showed that our proposed model not only outperforms deep neural network baselines but also other classic machine learning approaches. The extended Min-Max smoothing technique is step towards forecasting non-stationary financial time series with deep neural networks.