XGBoost for prediction of Ethereum short-term returns based on technical factor

Abstract

Unlike traditional currencies that rely on centralized such as banks or governments, cryptocurrencies today have become popular due to its decentralized transactions. Decentralization takes advantage of no requirement for intermediaries, thus reducing transaction fees and processing time. However, investing in cryptocurrencies incurs risks and uncertainties due to price volatility and rapid changes. The fact that prediction of asset prices is complex due to the influence of multiple factors on price movements. This paper studied the technical factor to analyze the short-term returns of Ethereum in the periods of 1-10 days. The historical data containing Ethereum closing price are collected from CoinGecko. The twenty-two indicators are chosen from Momentum, Volatility, and Sentiment factors as candidates to provide valuable insights in market trends. The values of these indicators are calculated based on past Ethereum closing prices and then used for XGBoost learning to discover patterns in previous trading. The model performance is evaluated using the multi-class AUC-ROC metric, which measures the accuracy of predicting three types of Ethereum returns: Downtrend, Sideway, and Uptrend. The experimental results reported that the models achieved the values of micro-average ROC curve ranging from 0.65 to 0.67. Moreover, the study emphasizes the importance of considering momentum indicators when making investment decisions in Ethereum.