Dynamic instance weighting for online learning in multi-cryptocurrency price and trend forecasting

Abstract The cryptocurrency market represents a significant innovation in the financial ecosystem, built upon cryptographic principles to ensure secure and transparent transactions. Cryptocurrencies experienced a global adoption, driven by their decentralized nature that enables borderless transactions without third-party intermediaries. The price of cryptocurrencies is characterized by a significant volatility, that introduces both opportunities and challenges. In this context, the development of accurate methods for the forecasting of price variation, able to work in real-time on data streams, has become vital for various stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called LEMON, for the online prediction of the price variation of cryptocurrencies, that leverages possible temporal correlations among them. Our approach stems from the empirical evidence that cryptocurrencies tend to form groups characterized by similar trends, a behavior often attributed to shared market dynamics and common external factors. Through the analysis of temporal correlations, LEMON dynamically identifies these groups, that are then exploited to learn multiple multi-target tree-based models, specifically designed for processing continuous data streams. LEMON also introduces a novel adaptive non-parametric weighting scheme, that automatically adjusts the importance of each instance based on the observed data distribution in real-time, improving the forecasting of the price variation. Our experiments, performed on 16 datasets related to 16 cryptocurrencies, demonstrate that LEMON outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in two distinct prediction tasks: forecasting the closing price variation (regression) and predicting the market trend direction (classification), making it an effective tool to support stakeholders requiring accurate real-time predictions.