Do the Hype of the Benefits from Using New Data Science Tools Extend to Forecasting Extremely Volatile Assets

This chapter first provides an illustration of the benefits of using machine learning for forecasting relative to traditional econometric strategies. We consider the short-term volatility of the Bitcoin market by realized volatility observations. Our analysis highlights the importance of accounting for nonlinearities to explain the gains of machine learning algorithms and examines the robustness of our findings to the selection of hyperparameters. This provides an illustration of how different machine learning estimators improve the development of forecast models by relaxing the functional form assumptions that are made explicit when writing up an econometric model. Our second contribution is to illustrate how deep learning can be used to measure market-level sentiment from a 10% random sample of Twitter users. This sentiment variable significantly improves forecast accuracy for every econometric estimator and machine algorithm considered in our forecasting application. This provides an illustration of the benefits of new tools from the natural language processing literature at creating variables that can improve the accuracy of forecasting models.