A Performance Comparison of LSTM and GRU Architectures for Forecasting Daily Bitcoin Price Volatility
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Abstract
The highly volatile movement of Bitcoin prices necessitates the use of prediction methods capable of accurately capturing complex and rapidly changing patterns. This study aims to compare the performance of two recurrent neural network architectures, namely Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), in forecasting Bitcoin prices based on historical time series data. The analysis was conducted using daily closing price data, with several parameter configurations applied, including dropout value, learning rate, and number of epochs at a window size of 30. The training process was carried out using a univariate approach to assess the fundamental ability of each model to learn temporal patterns without the influence of external variables. The results indicate that the GRU model consistently outperforms LSTM across most experimental settings. The best performance was achieved with 30 epochs, dropout 0.1, and a learning rate of 0.001, producing RMSE 1478.333, MAE 1000.900, R² 0.996081, and MAPE 1.973072. These metrics demonstrate a lower error level and a stronger fit to actual Bitcoin price movements. Moreover, a paired t-test confirmed that the performance gap between the two models is statistically significant. Overall, the findings suggest that the Gated Recurrent Unit architecture is more efficient in capturing nonlinear patterns and responding to the volatile dynamics of cryptocurrency price fluctuations, making it a promising approach for future predictive modeling in financial time series.
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