Bitcoin Analysis and Forecasting through Fuzzy Transform

Abstract

Sentiment analysis to characterize the properties of Bitcoin prices and their forecasting is here developed thanks to the capability of the Fuzzy Transform (F-transform for short) to capture stylized facts and mutual connections between time series with different natures. The recently proposed Lp-norm F-transform is a powerful and flexible methodology for data analysis, non-parametric smoothing and for fitting and forecasting. Its capabilities are illustrated by empirical analyses concerning Bitcoin prices and Google Trend scores (six years of daily data): we apply the (inverse) F-transform to both time series and, using clustering techniques, we identify stylized facts for Bitcoin prices, based on (local) smoothing and fitting F-transform, and we study their time evolution in terms of a transition matrix. Finally, we examine the dependence of Bitcoin prices on Google Trend scores and we estimate short-term forecasting models; the Diebold–Mariano (DM) test statistics, applied for their significance, shows that sentiment analysis is useful in short-term forecasting of Bitcoin cryptocurrency.