Dynamic Bayesian Networks for Predicting Cryptocurrency Price Directions: Uncovering Causal Relationships

Abstract Cryptocurrencies have gained widespread attention, particularly in finance and investment sectors. Despite their growing popularity, cryptocurrencies can be a high-risk investment due to their price volatility. The inherent volatility in cryptocurrency prices, coupled with the effects of external global economic factors, makes predicting their price movements challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN)-based approach to uncover potential causal relationships among various features including social media data, traditional financial market factors, and technical indicators. This study focuses on six major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Binance Coin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and Tether. The proposed model’s performance is compared to five baseline models of auto-regressive integrated moving average, support vector regression, long short-term memory, random forests, support vector machines, and a large language model. Results demonstrate that while DBN performance varies across cryptocurrencies, with some cryptocurrencies exhibiting higher predictive accuracy than others, the DBN significantly outperforms the baseline models.