A Nonlinear Technical Indicator Selection Approach for Stock Markets. Application to the Chinese Stock Market

In this paper we present a combinatorial nonlinear technical indicator approach for the identification of appropriate combinations of stock technical indicators as inputs in non-linear models. This approach is illustrated with the example of Chinese stock indexes and 35 different stock technical indicators using neural networks as the chosen non-linear method. Stock market technical indicators can generate contradictory signals regarding the future performance of the stock analyzed. Furthermore, some non-linear methods, such as neural networks, can have poor generalization power when dealing with problems of high dimensionality due to the issue of local minima. Therefore, non-linear approaches that can identify appropriate combinations of input variables are of clear importance. It will be shown that the proposed approach, when using neural networks as classifiers, generates error rates lower than those using directly neural networks without dimensionality reduction. It will also be shown that merely increasing the number of neurons does not increase the accuracy. The approach proposed in this article is illustrated with an application to the stock market using neural networks but it could be applied to other fields and it can also be used with other non-linear techniques such as for instance support vector machines.