A Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Decision Support System for Automated Stock Market Trading

Abstract

Presently, the volatile and dynamic aspects of stock prices are significant research challenges for stock markets or any other financial sector to design accurate and profitable trading strategies in all market situations. To meet such challenges, the usage of computer-aided stock trading techniques has grown in prominence in recent decades owing to their ability to rapidly and accurately analyze stock market situations. In the recent past, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods and trading bots are commonly utilized for algorithmic trading. However, in the existing literature, the trading agents employ the historical and present trends of stock prices as an observing state to make trading decisions without taking into account the long-term market future pattern of stock prices. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a novel decision support system for automated stock trading based on deep reinforcement learning that observes both past and future trends of stock prices whether single and multi-step ahead as an observing state to make the optimal trading decisions of buying, selling, and holding the stocks. More specifically, at every time step, future trends are monitored concurrently using a forecasting network whose output is concatenated with past trends of stock prices. The concatenated vectors are subsequently supplied to the DRL agent as an observation state. In addition, the suggested forecasting network is built on a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). The GRU-based agent captures more informative and inherent aspects of time-series financial data. Furthermore, the suggested decision support system has been tested on several stock markets such as Tesla, IBM, Amazon, CSCO, and Chinese Stocks as well as equity markets i-e SSE Composite Index, NIFTY 50 Index, US Commodity Index Fund, and has achieved encouraging profit values while trading.