Enhanced Interpretable Forecasting of Cryptocurrency Prices Using Autoencoder Features and a Hybrid CNN-LSTM Model

Predicting the price of Bitcoin is crucial, primarily because of the market’s rapid volatility and non-linear environment. For enhanced prediction of the price of Bitcoin, this research proposed a novel interpretable hybrid technique that combines long short-term memory (LSTM) networks with convolutional neural networks (CNN). Deep variational autoencoders (VAE) are used in the stage of preprocessing to determine noticeable patterns in datasets by learning features from historical Bitcoin price data. The CNN-LSTM model additionally implies Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) to promote interpretability and clarify the role of various features. For better performance, the methodology used data cleaning, preprocessing, and effective machine-learning techniques. The hybrid CNN + LSTM model, in collaboration with VAE, obtains a mean squared Error (MSE) of 0.0002, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.008, and an R-squared (R2) of 0.99, based on the experimental results. These results show that the proposed model is a good financial forecast method since it effectively reflects the complex dynamics of primary changes in the price of Bitcoin. The combination of deep learning and explainable artificial intelligence improves predictive accuracy as well as transparency, thus qualifying the model as highly useful for investors and analysts.