A comparative study of bitcoin price prediction during pre-Covid19 and whilst-Covid19 period using time series and machine learning models

Investment in cryptocurrencies has garnered substantial attention in the recent past as the prices for these digital currencies started recording all-time highs. While there are numerous contenders in the cryptocurrency market, bitcoin has emerged to be the most popular and sought after digital currency. Despite its popularity, the theoretical understanding of the value of this cryptocurrency is still limited. Hence this study aims to find out the significant predictors of the bitcoin price and build a machine-learning based model to evaluate and predict the complex phenomenon of bitcoin price. Here we contribute to the extant literature by searching for the potential contributors of bitcoin prices ranging from fundamental, macroeconomic, financial, speculative, and technical sources to the most marked event of 2020 i.e., Covid19 pandemic. For this purpose, we have used state-of-the-art machine learning, deep learning, and statistical time-series models (univariate and multivariate) to forecast bitcoin price. The study revealed that deep learning models performed almost at par with Random Forest model for both pre- and whilst-Covid19 era. Traditional time-series models, namely VAR and VECM gave the most consistent performance within acceptable margins for both pre- and whilst-Covid era. We have also found that macroeconomic factors play an important role in determining bitcoin price formulation process during both periods, while mining difficulty and market sentiment factors gain more importance during pre-Covid period. In addition, number of covid cases is also found to be a significant factor for the prediction of bitcoin price during whilst-Covid period.