Combining Time Series and Sentiment Analysis for Stock Market Forecasting
- This thesis analyzes whether financial news articles can predict the stock prices of companies and the S&P 500 Index. The selected companies for the analysis are Facebook Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google (Alphabet Inc.), and Amazon.com Inc. This thesis evaluates the predictive power of financial news by comparing the sentiment of financial news articles published on a business day to
the corresponding closing value of stock prices and the S&P 500 Index. For the analysis, financial news from various resources is used for a time period between January 2018 and May 2018. The sentiment of the news articles is analyzed using a lexicon-based approach. Then, regression models are used to predict the stock market. The models used for forecasting the stock prices and the S&P 500 Index
are Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Support Vector
Regression (SVR), and Linear Regression (LR). The results of the research in overall indicate that ARIMA performs better for predicting the stock prices and the S&P 500 Index.