Hybrid LSTM and GRU for Cryptocurrency Price Forecasting Based on Social Network Sentiment Analysis Using FinBERT

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies are digital assets that are widely used for trading and investing. One of the characteristics that traders take advantage of for profit is the high volatility of the price. Its volatile and rapidly changing prices have made cryptocurrency price predictions a challenging and highly sought-after research topic. Cryptocurrency price predictions usually only use historical prices on the dataset, while price movements are also influenced by other aspects such as sentiment contained in social media. This study proposes a new machine learning method to predict Ethereum and Solana cryptocurrency price, which integrates cryptocurrency historical price data and social media sentiment as inputs of the prediction model. FinBERT, a pre-trained sentiment analysis model is used to extract the sentiment implied in social network tweets into daily sentiment score, which are then combined with the historical market price data. The hybrid model of LSTM-GRU model is used to train the dataset and perform cryptocurrency price prediction. The experiment results show that the presented method can successfully predict the Ethereum and Solana price movement and has superior performance than all the benchmark models.