Combining wavelet-based feature extractions with relevance vector machines for stock index forecasting

The relevance vector machine (RVM) is a Bayesian version of the support vector machine, which with a sparse model representation has appeared to be a powerful tool for time-series forecasting. The RVM has demonstrated better performance over other methods such as neural networks or autoregressive integrated moving average based models. This study proposes a hybrid model that combines wavelet-based feature extractions with RVM models to forecast stock indices. The time series of explanatory variables are decomposed using some wavelet bases and the extracted time-scale features serve as inputs of an RVM to perform the non-parametric regression and forecasting. Compared with traditional forecasting models, our proposed method performs best. The root-mean-squared forecasting errors are significantly reduced.