Recurrent neural networks and ARIMA models for euro/dollar exchange rate forecasting

Analyzing the future behaviors of currency pairs represents a priority for governments, financial institutions, and investors, who use this type of analysis to understand the economic situation of a country and determine when to sell and buy goods or services from a particular location. Several models are used to forecast this type of time series with reasonable accuracy. However, due to the random behavior of these time series, achieving good forecasting performance represents a significant challenge. In this paper, we compare forecasting models to evaluate their accuracy in the short term using data on the EUR/USD exchange rate. For this purpose, we used three methods: Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) of the Elman type, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The analyzed period spanned from 2 January 1998, to 31 December 2019, and was divided into training and validation datasets. We performed forecasting calculations to predict windows with six different forecasting horizons. We found that the window of one month with 22 observations better matched the validation dataset in the short term compared to the other windows. Theil’s U coefficients calculated for this window were 0.04743, 0.002625, and 0.001808 for the ARIMA, Elman, and LSTM networks, respectively. LSTM provided the best forecast in the short term, while Elman provided the best forecast in the long term. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.