Journal of Mathematical Finance, 2020, 10, 132-139

https://www.scirp.org/journal/jmf
ISSN Online: 2162-2442
ISSN Print: 2162-2434

Bitcoin Price Prediction Based on Deep

Learning Methods

Xiangxi Jiang

Barstow School of Ningbo, Ningbo, China

How to cite this paper: Jiang, X.X. (2020) Abstract

Bitcoin Price Prediction Based on Deep
Learning Methods. Journal of Mathematical Bitcoin is a current popular cryptocurrency with a promising future. It’s like a
Finance, 10, 132-139. stock market with time series, the series of indexed data points. We looked at
https://doi.org/10.4236/jmf.2020.101009
different deep learning networks and methods of improving the accuracy, in-
Received: August 30, 2019
cluding min-max normalization, Adam optimizer and windows min-max
Accepted: February 8, 2020 normalization. We gathered data on the Bitcoin price per minute, and we
Published: February 11, 2020 rearranged them to reflect Bitcoin price in hours, a total of 56,832 points. We
took 24 hours of data as input and output the Bitcoin price of the next hour.
Copyright © 2020 by author(s) and
Scientific Research Publishing Inc.
We compared the different models and found that the lack of memory means
This work is licensed under the Creative that Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) is ill-suited for the case of predicting
Commons Attribution International price based on current trend. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) provides
License (CC BY 4.0).
relatively the best prediction when past memory and Gated Recurrent Net-
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
work (GRU) is included in the model.
Open Access

Keywords
Deep Learning Model, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Gated Recurrent Network,
Long Short-Term Memory, Cross-Validation, Normalization

1. Introduction
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a form of electronic cash. It is a digital currency
that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network without
intermediaries. It keeps a record of trading among peers and every record is en-
crypted. Each new record created contains the cryptographic hash of a previous
block. Each record contains a timestamp and the data of the sender, the receiver,
and the amount. Given Bitcoin is an emerged technology, few predictions is made
on Bitcoin future value. Greaves and Au used linear regression, logistic regres-
sion and support vector machine to predict Bitcoin future price with low per-
formance [1]. Indira et al. proposed a Multi-layer Perceptron based non-linear

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 X. X. Jiang

autoregressive with External Inputs (NARX) model to predict Bitcoin price of

the next day [2]. Jakob Aungiers proposed a long-short term memory deep neural
networks to predict S & P 500 stock price [3]. His research sheds light on Bitcoin
prediction which is similar to stock price. Madan et al. used more machine
learning approaches like generalized linear models and random forest to address
Bitcoin prediction problem [4].
Researches mentioned above focuses on predicting the Bitcoin price of the
next day. However, Bitcoin is traded frequently in a much smaller interval. In
this research, we try to use historical data to predict next hour’s price instead of
next day’s price which may have better application in real world. First we im-
plemented data normalization like min-max normalization and normalization
with window [5] where the data is normalized based on the window’s initial val-
ue and the percentage of change. Multiple Layer Perceptron (MLP), Long-Short-
Term-Memory (LSTM) and Gated recurrent units (GRU) models are compared
on the test dataset with cross-validation.

2. Dataset Exploration
Data used in this research is collected from Kaggle [6]. Bitcoin data from Jan
2012 to July 2018 is collected. It has a timestamp, the value at Open, High, Low,
Close, the volume traded in Bitcoin and USD, the weighted price and the date.
This research focuses on predicting Bitcoin price in the future hour by using the
price of past 24 hours, so only the timestamp and the weighted price are used in
the model.

3. Pre-Processing
As shown in Figure 1, the dataset is by minute, and contains around 3,409,920
points. Since we predicted the price by hours, we have had 1,409,920/60 which is
56,832 datapoints. The dataset is further split into training, validating and test-
ing sets. As shown in Figure 2, training data takes up to 80% of the entire data-
set, and validating and testing 10% respectively. As the time series data, samples
are not randomized. We used the first 24 hours’ Bitcoin price as input to predict
the next hours’ Bitcoin price. Several other pre-processing methods are imple-
mented to improve data processing and model convergency efficiency. Mini-
batch is used to split large data into small batches, which improves memory effi-
ciency. Minimum-Maximum normalization and window-based normalization is
used to set the whole training dataset to (−1, 1) scale. Window normalization is
based on the reference of stock market. The normalization methods will take
each sized window and normalize each one to reflect percentage changes from
the start hour of the window [3].

4. Models
Deep learning network is a type of computer modeling that finds the pattern
within the given datasets and categorize the input accordingly. There are many

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X. X. Jiang

Figure 1. The overview of data listed by minutes.

Figure 2. Training, validating and testing dataset.

different structures for deep learning network, including Multiple Layer Percep-
tron (MLP) that has a linear activation function, Recurrent Neural Network
(RNN) that records a separate hidden unit to influence the next calculation. Ex-
tensions of RNN include Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recur-
rent Model (GRU).
MLP is a basic method in prediction. It reads all input with no ordering and
then determine the relationship between the independent variables and the de-

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 X. X. Jiang

pendent variables. Hidden layers can be added between the input layer and the
output layer together with the activation function, to better describe the non-linear
relationship.
RNN is a group of method to calculate products from previous result of the
model and new input data. In fact, it is better to MLP that it has “experience”
from last calculations that will influence its calculations. The “experience” is
gained from the model, is kept privately but is allowed to pass onto the next
model. This private variable is called the hidden state and is passed on from the
current calculation to the future calculation. It determines independently the
output of the model, apart from the algorithm itself. However, RNN model de-
pends on the continuous flow, which is sequential like the time series, in order to
input data for the training. If the pattern repeats only over the long term, the
previous repetition may be not influential enough to affect it at the next repeti-
tion. It also requires the data to be in order of time. Therefore determines, unlike
MLP, RNN cannot be given random samples.
Long Short-Term Memory solves the issue that the diminished influence of
distant events on the RNN network. It has a switch that can choose certain
events to remember. It also is not long-term dependent and doesn’t require as
much training. It has four layers to determine the output, then passes the hidden
state with the result to the next cycle. “Forgetting gates” exists in addition to four
layers to determine if the experience should not be counted. Four layers and
forgetting gates can be given different information to focus on either short-term
or long-term memory.
GRU or Gated Recurrent Model is considered as one of the simpler model
compared to the LSTM model, combination of the “forget” step with the “input”
step into one, and as a result, requires only one hidden unit.
Among the three methods, MLP is mostly credited with its simplicity and the
need for less computational power. They have the same amount of information
as input. However, the number of hidden layers and the hidden units are more
magic numbers. Some number turns out to work well especially, while some may
turn out to be just the opposite. RNN accounts on the previous model through
the hidden unit. The value uses in the calculation but does not need interven-
tion. It can be very accurate, given the fact that the model has a large training set.
However, long term patterns cannot be memorized and this may result in inac-
curacy, especially when rapid changes take place in recent years. LSTM can
choose whether it should “forget” previous states. Therefore, it is better capable
of dealing with data that has repetitive trend over a long time. GRU model is also
able to choose whether it should recall previous experience, but it is capable of
learning more rapidly and need a bit less resource.
Six models are compared in this research. The model setups are listed in the
following Table 1 and training results will be discussed in the next part.

5. Results
As shown in Figure 3, in MLP and RNN frameworks, we find the similar

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X. X. Jiang

Figure 3. Training performance of models. (a) MLP with whole-dataset-normalization;

(b) MLP with window-normalization; (c) RNN with whole-dataset-based normalization;
(d) RNN with window-normalization.

Table 1. Font sizes of headings. Table captions should always be positioned above the
tables.

Model Layer Information

2 Layer MLP [256, 256]

3 Layer MLP [256, 128, 64]

2 Layer LSTM [256, 256]

2 Layer LSTM + 1Fully Connected layer [256, 256] + [128]

3 Layer LSTM [256, 256, 128]

2 Layer GRU [256, 256]

conclusion that window-based normalization is much better than whole-dataset-

based normalization. Because of time-series data feature, the RNN frameworks
converge faster than MLP methods. Model performance in this research is eva-
luated by Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of the predicted price and the true
price of the dataset. The results are listed in the following table. As shown in Ta-
ble 2, normalization by window method performs much better.
We visualize the predicted price in the test dataset against true values in Fig-
ure 4 and zoom in to have a closer look at the predicted price in Figure 5. We
can find that LSTM with normalization by window is the best combination.
A ten-fold cross-validation is conducted on all the models. As shown in Fig-
ure 6, we can see that the error goes down after the training set is enlarged. At
the end of the time-series data, when the fluctuation goes high, the error goes up
a little again. Based on the cross-validation results, as summarized in Table 3, 2
layers of GRU is the best, and 2 layers of LSTM are very close to the performance.

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 X. X. Jiang

Figure 4. Predicted price on the test dataset.

Figure 5. Zooming in.

Table 2. RMES of six models by different normalization methods.

Normalized By Window Normalized Whole Dataset

2 Layer MLP 131.023 2541.128

3 Layer MLP 156.922 3692.356

2 Layer LSTM 125.387 8312.999

2 Layer LSTM + 1FC 126.016 9187.938

3 Layer LSTM 125.414 Not tried

2 Layer GRU 126.512 Not tried

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X. X. Jiang

Figure 6. Cross validation results. The top one is the 10-fold split of original data, the
middle one is the average RMSE for each fold, the bottom one is the RMSE/average price
in that fold.

Table 3. Summarize of cross-validation results.

Mean RMSE Std RMSE

2 Layer MLP 20.093 39.630
3 Layer MLP 22.736 45.711
2 Layer LSTM 19.121 38.214
2 Layer LSTM + 1FC 19.486 38.808
3 Layer LSTM 19.250 38.177
2 Layer GRU 19.020 38.146

6. Conclusion and Discussion

According to cross-validation results, 2 layers of LSTM has the best performance
on the original test dataset and 2 layers of GRU is the best. All six models have
close performance, so different models may be preferred in different scenarios.
MLP model requires less computing power while it has slightly lower perfor-
mance than RNN model. Our study combines several unique features, including
the hour-based prediction, the usage of data from the past 24 hours, normaliza-
tion by window and the comparison of different types of model with different
amounts of layers. Based on this research, future work can be done on predicting
a sequence of estimation so that it can be applied in more common Bitcoin
trading scenarios.

Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this pa-
per.

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 X. X. Jiang

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DOI: 10.4236/jmf.2020.101009 139 Journal of Mathematical Finance