Development of a cryptocurrency price prediction model: leveraging GRU and LSTM for Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum

Cryptocurrency represents a form of asset that has arisen from the progress of financial technology, presenting significant prospects for scholarly investigations. The ability to anticipate cryptocurrency prices with extreme accuracy is very desirable to researchers and investors. However, time-series data presents significant challenges due to the nonlinear nature of the cryptocurrency market, complicating precise price predictions. Several studies have explored cryptocurrency price prediction using various deep learning (DL) algorithms. Three leading cryptocurrencies, determined by market capitalization, Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), and Litecoin (LTC), are examined for exchange rate predictions in this study. Two categories of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), specifically long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU), are employed. Four performance metrics are selected to evaluate the prediction accuracy namely mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and root mean squared error (RMSE) for three cryptocurrencies which demonstrates that GRU model outperforms LSTM. The GRU model was implemented as a two-layer deep learning network, optimized using the Adam optimizer with a dropout rate of 0.2 to prevent overfitting. The model was trained using normalized historical price data sourced from CryptoDataDownload, with an 80:20 train-test split. In this work, GRU qualifies as the best algorithm for developing a cryptocurrency price prediction model. MAPE values for BTC, LTC and ETH are 0.03540, 0.08703 and 0.04415, respectively, which indicate that GRU offers the most accurate forecasts as compared to LSTM. These prediction models are valuable for traders and investors, offering accurate cryptocurrency price predictions. Future studies should also consider additional variables, such as social media trends and trade volumes that may impact cryptocurrency pricing.