A fusion framework for forecasting financial market direction using enhanced ensemble models and technical indicators

People continuously hunt for a precise and productive strategy to control the stock exchange because the monetary trade is recognised for its unbelievably different character and unpredictability. Even a minor gain in predicting performance will be extremely profitable and significant. Our novel study implemented six boosting techniques, i.e., XGBoost, AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting, LightGBM, CatBoost, and Histogram-based Gradient Boosting, and these boosting techniques were hybridised using a stacking framework to find out the direction of the stock market. Five different stock datasets were selected from four different countries and were used for our experiment. We used two-way overfitting protection during our model building process, i.e., dynamic reduction technique and cross-validation technique. For model evaluation purposes, we used the performance metrics, i.e., accuracy, ROC curve (AUC), F-score, precision, and recall. The aim of our study was to propose and select a predictive model whose training and testing accuracy difference was minimal in all stocks. The findings revealed that the meta-classifier Meta-LightGBM had training and testing accuracy differences that were very low among all stocks. As a result, a proper model selection might allow investors the freedom to invest in a certain stock in order to successfully control risk and create short-term, sustainable profits.