DEEP LEARNING AND TECHNICAL ANALYSIS IN

CRYPTOCURRENCY MARKET
Stéphane Goutteb , Hoang-Viet Lea,b,* , Fei Liuc and Hans-Jörg von Mettenheimc,a,d
a
Keynum Investments, France
b
Université Paris Saclay, UMI SOURCE, IRD, UVSQ, France
c
IPAG Business School, France
d
Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, United Kingdom

Abstract
A large number of modern practices in financial forecasting rely on technical analysis, which
involves several heuristics techniques of price charts visual pattern recognition as well as other
technical indicators. In this study, we aim to investigate the potential use of those technical infor-
mation (candlestick information as well as technical indicators) as inputs for machine learning
models, especially the state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms, to generate trading signals. To
properly address this problem, empirical research is conducted which applies several machine
learning methods to 5 years of Bitcoin hourly data from 2017 to 2022. From the result of our
study, we confirm the potential of trading strategies using machine learning approaches. We also
find that among several machine learning models, deep learning models, specifically the recurrent
neural networks, tend to outperform the others in time-series prediction.

Keywords: Bitcoin, Technical Analysis, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Convolutional Neu-
ral Networks, Recurrent Neural Network

* Corresponding author: Hoang-Viet Le, [email protected]

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1 I NTRODUCTION

Even since the success of Google’s AlphaGo against the Go World Champion in 2016, the keywords
AI (Artificial Intelligence), machine learning, and deep learning have become the buzzwords that
keep being mentioned in almost every industry. As a matter of fact, machine learning has already
been slowly yet steadily transforming your everyday activities.
The finance industry, as expected, is one of the pioneers to incorporate AI technologies into its
ecosystems. In recent years, more and more studies have been published that were based on the
application of machine learning models on forecasting time series and many of them point out the
relatively better performances of newer machine learning models compared to classical time series
forecasting techniques[9; 4; 11]. Additionally, the widespread and easy-to-access automated elec-
tronic trading systems coupled with increasing demand for better alpha keeps forcing trading prac-
titioners and researchers to put more effort into searching for better and more sophisticated models.
Not until recently, the technique of deep learning (DL), a subset of machine learning which involves
the application of neural networks, started to emerge as one of the best performing techniques within
the field of machine learning in a vast majority of implementation areas. It is no exception in the case
of financial time series forecasting as a growing number of deep-learning-based models of predic-
tion have been introduced in several conferences and journals in recent years. Gu et al. (2020) used
neural networks to forecast stock prices from the US market to find out their superiority over other
models such as generalized linear models, principal components regressions, and regression trees[6].
Zhang et al. (2021) utilize the recurrent neural networks, specifically the long short-term memory
(LSTM) networks, to predict stock trends report significant positive returns[12]. The work of Bianchi
et al. (2021), on the other hand, focus on forecasting bond excess returns and also report significant
economic gains[3]. Some other studies target other financial assets such as cryptocurrencies and also
often point out the edge of the neural networks model on forecasting future price movements (Anghel,
2020[1]).
In this paper, we tried to put into practice those state-of-the-art deep learning models along with
other popular machine learning models to see how well they perform in finding trading signals using
the same inputs that was used in traditional technical analysis. While most of the other researches
on this topic focus on the traditional stock markets, this paper choose the cryptocurrency market,
specifically the Bitcoin market, as the target of research.

1.1 Data Source

Due to the borderless nature of crytocurrency market, the prices of cryptocurrencies are not the same
everywhere but vary between exchanges. In this research, we chose the Binance exchange as it is the
largest cryptocurrency exchanges based on its trading volume as of August 2022. The Binance ex-
change publicly offers historical data dating back to 2017. Transaction details are stored continuously
and are accessible at via its API. The exchange houses several sets of high-frequency data including
limit order quotes and trading logs (or market order logs). Due to the goal of our analysis, only the
trading logs (or trade data) are needed. Table 2 list out all the fields of the trading logs table and their
meanings.
Trade data table records every single transaction that had taken place. Each row refers to a trans-
action processed by the Binance exchange and obviously, it is possible that many transaction can
happen at the same time.

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 Table 1. Trade data table
Field name Type Description
1 timestamp datetime The moment at which the transaction occurs,
with precision to millisecond.
2 symbol string Ticker representing trading instrument.
3 side string The side of the trade, either Buy or Sell.
4 size integer The transaction size of the trade
5 price float The price that the trade was executed

As every transaction is recorded in this table, the total number of transactions is provided during
our chosen period from the end of 2017 until August 2022 is upto a few billions. This is an enormous
amount of data and is required to be processed for further analysis.

1.2 Data Preprocessing

The first step of the data preprocessing is to gather all of the needed data values from different data
sources into a single collection of databases. In this study, as all of our data come from the historical
trading database of Binance, there is no need for other sources of data. However, if any other types
of alternative data are considered such as order book data, sentimental or fundamental data, etc., they
should be included in this step. In this study, during these steps, several trivial data such as the ID of
a single trade, type of order, etc. will also be removed. In the end, all of the trades that happened in
every hour are resampled and grouped by their timestamps to create a new table of time series data
with the following header: timestamps, open, high, low, close, number of trades and volume.

Table 2. The Preprocessed Trade data

Field name Type Description
1 timestamp datetime The beginning time of the given period.
2 symbol string Ticker representing trading instrument, we only
concern the ticker BTCUSD.
3 open float The latest price that happened before the begin-
ning of the period
4 high float The maximum price that happened during the
period
5 low float The minimum price that happened during the
period
6 close float The latest price that happened before the end of
the period
7 trades integer The total number of transactions happened dur-
ing the period
8 volume float The total volume of currency that were traded
during the period

After the resampling procedure, the length of our dataset is reduced to only 43,463 data points.
For the purpose of training our machine learning models, the data will be divided into 3 parts: training
set, validation set, test set with the proportion of 50%, 25%, and 25% respectively.

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2 M ETHODOLOGY

2.1 Feature Engineering

2.1.1 Candlestick Data
Generally, the asset price data of a specific time period can be represented by four features: the open
price (the price at the beginning of the period), close price (price at the end of the period), high price
(the maximum price during the period), and low price (the minimum over the interval). However in
technical analysis, the candlestick can be visually encodes in a different way (Figure 1): the candle
body denotes the open and close prices, and the lines protruding from the bar (the candle’s shadow)
denote the extrema over the interval. Finally, the color of the bar implies the relative return of the
period: a white (sometimes green) candle denotes a positive return over the interval (close price >
open price) and a black (sometimes red) candle denotes a negative return (close price < open price).

Figure 1. Candle stick example

Source:[10]

The specific formulas to transform the price variables into a candlestick are as follows:
(
W hite if Close − Open > 0
Color = (1)
Black if Close − Open < 0

Candle Body = |Close − Open| (2)

(
(High − Close) if Close − Open > 0
U pper Shadow = (3)
(High − Open) if Close − Open < 0
(
(Open − Low) if Close − Open > 0
Lower Shadow = (4)
(Close − Low) if Close − Open < 0

2.1.2 Technical Indicators

Despite its popularity, in practice, candlestick patterns are often used in combination with several
other qualitative indicators such as support and resistance, Fibonacci retracement, etc. or even pop-
ular statistical indicators like the moving average, etc. In our study, aside from the raw features

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mentioned in the previous section, we also introduced an extended dataset that includes several pop-
ular technical analysis indicators to reflect the actual practice of technical analysis. The results from
both the ”raw” dataset and the ”extended” data set will also be compared to see the effectiveness of
technical indicators to the model.
In the extended dataset, we include simple moving average (SMA) and relative strength index
(RSI) of multiple time steps, and other more complex indicators such as the moving average con-
vergence/divergence oscillator (MACD), the Williams percent range (Williams %R), the stochastic
oscillator, and the money flow index (MFI).

2.2 Data Labeling

In our study, our labels are chosen to be binary ([Buy, N ot Buy or [Sell, N ot Sell] which are similar
to trading signals used in technical analysis. The horizon of prediction is the direction of the next 3
hours or the next 3 candlesticks so that a trend can be formed. Finally, no threshold for the return is
used so that positive return will be labeled as the signal for buy and vice versa.

Table 3. Data labeling

Dataset Proportion Long Short
Training 50.00% 51.29% 48.71%
Validation 25.00% 51.54% 48.46%
Test 25.00% 49.72% 50.28%

2.3 Model Specifications

In this paper, seven popular machine learning algorithms were used which is the simple Logistic
regression, two decision tree-based gradient boosting models (XGBoost and LightGBM), and four
neural networks models (MLP, GRU, LSTM, and CNN).
For logistic regression model, we choose the logistic regression algorithm provided by the Scikit-
learn library using the default specification with the L2 regularization to prevent overfitting. For both
XGBoost and LightGBM, we used their official Python libraries. For this two algorithms, we use 100
trees as it is a popular parameter used in several pieces of researches [2; 8; 13; 7] and all others were
set as default.
Regarding neural networks models, in this study, all of our models are built and trained using the
Python library Keras running on top of the TensorFlow framework. The architecture of our neural
networks will generally follow the work of Roberts, S. et al (2020)[5]. In his work, he built an MLP
model and extended it to other deep learning models based on it. The architecture of the MLP model
as follows:

Table 4. MLP architecture

# Layer Units Activation Function Dropout
0 Input - - -
1 Dense 64 ReLU 0.5
2 Dense 64 ReLU 0.5
3 Dense 1 Sigmoid -

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 For the 2 recurrent neural network models, LSTM and GRU, to keep the model to be comparable
with the MLP model, the new recurrent layer with only 8 neurons will be added before the 2 fully-
connected layers of the MLP. Table 5 illustrates the architecture of the LSTM and GRU model.

Table 5. LSTM/GRU architecture

# Layer Units Activation Function Dropout
0 Input - - -
1 LSTM/GRU 8 ReLU 0.5
2 Dense 64 ReLU 0.5
3 Dense 64 ReLU 0.5
4 Dense 1 Sigmoid -

Finally for the CNN, instead of the recurrent layers like LSTM or GRU, two convolutional layers
are added along with two max-pooling layers and 0.5 dropouts each. Each of the convolutional layers
has 8 neurons, similar to the recurrent neural network architecture.

Table 6. CNN architecture

# Layer Units Activation Function Dropout Filter size Padding
0 Input - - - - -
1 Convolutional 8 ReLU - 3 same
2 MaxPooling - - 0.5 2 same
3 Convolutional 8 ReLU - 3 same
4 MaxPooling - - 0.5 2 same
5 Dense 64 ReLU 0.5 - -
6 Dense 64 ReLU 0.5 - -
7 Dense 1 Sigmoid - - -

All of the neural network models are training in 500 training epochs with batch size equaling to
1024. Early stopping and model checkpoints based on the validation loss are also used to prevent
overfitting so that we can get the best performing model on the validation set.

2.4 Model Evaluation

2.4.1 Precision and Recall
Precision and recall are also popular metrics that usually go together for evaluating classifier perfor-
mance and will be used as the main metrics in this paper. The increases in either precision or recall
are often achieved at the expense of the other, i.e. high precision is achieved at the expense of recall,
and high recall is achieved at the expense of precision. Usually, an ideal model would love to have
both high recall and high precision but this is usually hard to be achieved in practice. Due to the fact
that a buy signal does not necessarily lead to a good return and investors usually look for a good re-
turn rather than normal return, in combination with the existence of transaction costs, a good trading
signal system generally prefers a high precision with a reasonable recall.

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2.4.2 Return and Average Return
As this study focuses on the feasibility of trading strategy based on several signal generators, it is
always a good idea to include the financial metrics such as return into the study. For the sake of
simplicity, we do not incorporate the transaction cost into the study. The return, therefore, will be
calculated based on the compounded return formula:
N
Y
T otal Return = (1 + Ri Si ) (5)
i=1

where Ri is the return of every time step, and Si is the binary signal generated by the model at each
specific time step.
Using this total return as a metric, however, does not incorporate the transaction cost and therefore
the higher return may come from many small trades instead of the quality of every single trade (again
recall versus precision). As a result, in this study, we will primarily use the metrics of average return
to reflect the quality of the signal instead.
T otal Return
Average Return = PN (6)
i=1 Si

3 R ESULT AND D ISCUSSION

3.1 General Discussion

As discussed in the previous section, the goal of our study is to not only to find out the potential
application of machine learning in generate trading signals but also to find out whether or not the rep-
resentation of candlestick and other popular technical indicators are necessary for the improvement of
the models. Therefore, we applied several subsets of features are compared to each other to compared
their usefulness.
The first dimension for the set of features is about the representation of the candlestick. In section
2.1, we have mentioned that the candlestick has 3 main characteristics: the candle body, the upper
shadow, and the lower shadow. In combination with the close price, we use them to create the ”candle”
features dataset to compare with the traditional ”ohlc” dataset, which contains open, high, low, close
price, to see which approach serve better as the input for the machine learning models.
The second dimension is about the inclusion of additional technical indicators or not. The feature
dataset with the inclusion of additional technical indicators is called the ”extended” feature dataset.
For the original set of features (only 4 candlestick features, trades, and volume and the cyclical), we
called it the ”raw” feature dataset.

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 Table 7. Performance of All Long-Only Models
Validation Test
Model Candlestick Feature Strategy
Precision Recall Avg return Precision Recall Avg return
GRU candle extended long 61.74% 10.44% 0.17% 58.39% 10.87% 0.04%
GRU candle raw long 58.86% 11.27% 0.13% 58.34% 11.57% 0.03%
GRU ohlc extended long 58.08% 11.63% 0.08% 57.11% 10.76% 0.07%
CNN ohlc extended long 57.82% 10.31% 0.08% 57.02% 11.85% -0.02%
LSTM ohlc raw long 58.87% 10.96% 0.10% 56.72% 12.40% -0.02%
MLP candle extended long 59.82% 10.47% 0.11% 56.03% 11.82% 0.01%
MLP candle raw long 60.69% 10.20% 0.12% 55.90% 10.85% 0.04%
Logistic candle extended long 59.00% 9.73% 0.10% 55.83% 9.30% 0.01%
CNN candle extended long 58.74% 9.60% 0.09% 55.81% 9.56% -0.03%
CNN candle raw long 57.93% 11.89% 0.12% 55.71% 12.08% 0.01%
MLP ohlc raw long 57.56% 11.05% 0.07% 55.68% 11.57% -0.02%
LSTM candle raw long 60.20% 10.87% 0.15% 55.64% 10.39% -0.02%
LGBM candle raw long 56.51% 11.72% 0.06% 55.62% 11.92% -0.01%
CNN ohlc raw long 56.93% 9.44% 0.07% 55.60% 11.59% 0.00%
Logistic ohlc extended long 57.94% 9.93% 0.07% 55.53% 10.11% -0.02%
Logistic candle raw long 59.85% 9.08% 0.14% 55.19% 8.98% -0.02%
GRU ohlc raw long 58.06% 10.13% 0.08% 55.19% 12.68% -0.02%
LGBM candle extended long 60.03% 9.28% 0.14% 55.12% 9.09% 0.00%
LGBM ohlc extended long 59.74% 11.49% 0.12% 54.89% 10.64% 0.01%
LGBM ohlc raw long 61.72% 9.75% 0.13% 54.67% 9.49% -0.01%
XGBoost candle raw long 57.14% 10.18% 0.08% 54.59% 10.04% -0.01%
MLP ohlc extended long 59.04% 11.00% 0.08% 54.38% 11.06% -0.01%
LSTM candle extended long 60.88% 9.24% 0.13% 54.29% 8.79% -0.04%
LSTM ohlc extended long 58.80% 10.73% 0.07% 54.21% 11.78% -0.02%
XGBoost ohlc raw long 54.91% 9.48% 0.08% 54.10% 10.39% 0.03%
Logistic ohlc raw long 59.04% 9.04% 0.08% 54.09% 9.19% -0.02%
XGBoost ohlc extended long 56.97% 9.48% 0.05% 52.64% 9.23% -0.01%
XGBoost candle extended long 57.48% 9.26% 0.08% 52.20% 8.24% 0.01%

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 Table 8. Performance of All Short-Only Models
Validation Test
Model Candlestick Feature Strategy
Precision Recall Avg return Precision Recall Avg return
LGBM ohlc raw short 54.00% 11.23% -0.02% 60.05% 11.97% 0.07%
MLP candle extended short 57.93% 9.19% 0.04% 59.16% 9.31% 0.04%
LGBM candle extended short 55.59% 9.33% 0.04% 59.02% 9.36% 0.05%
LGBM candle raw short 54.01% 11.35% -0.02% 58.77% 11.35% 0.03%
GRU ohlc raw short 55.30% 11.40% -0.01% 58.31% 10.59% 0.05%
Logistic ohlc extended short 54.91% 10.35% 0.02% 58.02% 10.75% 0.03%
LSTM candle raw short 59.55% 11.40% 0.01% 57.84% 9.54% 0.01%
MLP ohlc extended short 55.24% 10.14% 0.01% 57.77% 12.08% 0.00%
LSTM ohlc raw short 57.54% 11.32% 0.00% 57.66% 10.16% 0.01%
LGBM ohlc extended short 53.98% 11.92% 0.01% 57.66% 11.28% 0.01%
Logistic candle extended short 56.32% 9.09% 0.01% 57.63% 8.90% 0.02%
LSTM ohlc extended short 56.43% 10.94% 0.00% 57.45% 10.94% -0.01%
CNN ohlc raw short 55.86% 10.75% 0.02% 57.29% 11.32% 0.03%
GRU candle raw short 57.91% 11.04% -0.02% 57.28% 8.19% -0.01%
Logistic ohlc raw short 53.76% 10.85% -0.03% 57.18% 10.75% 0.02%
CNN candle extended short 56.20% 9.90% 0.03% 57.10% 9.20% 0.03%
LSTM candle extended short 55.01% 11.87% -0.01% 56.52% 10.91% -0.01%
GRU ohlc extended short 52.02% 45.35% -0.02% 56.15% 46.05% 0.02%
MLP candle raw short 54.44% 10.04% -0.04% 56.02% 9.15% 0.00%
XGBoost candle raw short 52.96% 10.19% 0.00% 55.92% 10.48% 0.05%
CNN ohlc extended short 52.17% 44.80% -0.03% 55.89% 44.75% 0.02%
GRU candle extended short 51.91% 46.11% -0.02% 55.83% 47.91% 0.02%
XGBoost candle extended short 52.22% 10.35% -0.03% 55.78% 10.27% 0.02%
CNN candle raw short 55.29% 9.92% -0.02% 55.42% 9.36% -0.01%
MLP ohlc raw short 56.72% 10.83% 0.00% 54.55% 10.43% -0.01%
Logistic candle raw short 51.95% 47.20% 0.00% 54.44% 47.24% 0.02%
XGBoost ohlc extended short 53.08% 11.44% -0.02% 54.04% 10.87% 0.01%
XGBoost ohlc raw short 52.31% 9.43% -0.04% 53.02% 9.45% 0.00%

In combination with the primary two dimensions of long and short strategy, in the end, each type
of machine learning models are fitted 8 different times as the combination of the 3 dimensions. In the
end, we have in total 56 different models and all of their result are shown in Table 7 and Table 8.
The two tables show the list of all models with their performance metrics calculated on the val-
idation and the test set. The order of how they are listed is based on their precision on the test set,
from the highest to the lowest. From just a quick view of the two tables, we can see that most of the
top models are deep learning models with the exception of the LightGBM in shorting strategy. Addi-
tionally, all of the machine learning models overall outperform almost all of the candlestick patterns
in both precision and average return, given the same range of recall. Given the fact that the market
is quite bearish in the test set and the shorting is generally more difficult in practice, we believe the
performance for the long-only strategy is more reliabe compared to the short-only strategy
The best performing model here in both validation and test set is the GRU long-only model which
is trained on the extended candle dataset with 58.36% precision and the average return of 0.04%. The
performance of this strategy is shown in figure 2 and 3 where it is compared with the buy-and-hold
strategy of Bitcoin for reference.

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 Figure 2. Model Performance in Validation set

Figure 3. Model Performance in Test set

From the two figures, we can see the model outperformed the benchmark and there are way less
downtrends and drawdowns during the both period. The cumulative return of the strategy also increase
steadily and does not come from only a few single trades or some specific period.

3.2 Best Candlestick Features

Table 9. Comparison between 2 candlestick representation methods

Validation Test
Data
Precision Recall Avg return Precision Recall Avg return
candle 57.15% 12.86% 0.056% 56.26% 12.67% 0.010%
ohlc 56.39% 13.04% 0.038% 55.96% 13.36% 0.006%

10

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Table 9 presents the average performance metrics of all machine learning models using either the
”ohlc” features or the ”candle” features. From the table, we can see the reason why the candle
representation is more used in technical analysis. The performance of the candle data is slightly
better than the performance of the OHLC data (0.8% for the validation set and only 0.3% for the test
set).

3.3 Inclusion of Technical Indicators

The difference caused by the addition of technical indicators is even less noticeable compared to the
previous case. Table 10 illustrates the performance of the extended features in comparison with the
raw features.

Table 10. Comparison between the raw dataset and extended dataset
Validation Test
Feature
Precision Recall Avg return Precision Recall Avg return
extended 56.75% 14.05% 0.049% 56.12% 14.13% 0.009%
raw 56.78% 11.86% 0.045% 56.10% 11.90% 0.008%

The addition of 12 new technical indicators almost does not substantially increase the performance
of all machine learning models, at least in the quality of the signals. The inclusion of those indicators
only led to an increase of measly 0.02% in precision for the test set. However, those indicators surely
do increase the numbers of signals with more than 2% improvement in recall in both dataset.

3.4 Models Comparison

Finally, we would like to compare the general performance of every machine learning model that we
used. Table 11 shows the average performance metrics of all models.

Table 11. Average Performance of all models

Validation Test
Model
Precision Recall Avg return Precision Recall Avg return
GRU 56.73% 19.67% 0.048% 57.07% 19.83% 0.025%
LGBM 56.95% 10.76% 0.056% 56.97% 10.64% 0.018%
LSTM 58.41% 10.92% 0.059% 56.29% 10.61% -0.011%
CNN 56.37% 14.58% 0.045% 56.23% 14.96% 0.003%
MLP 57.68% 10.36% 0.048% 56.19% 10.78% 0.008%
Logistic 56.60% 14.41% 0.048% 55.99% 14.40% 0.005%
XGBoost 54.63% 9.98% 0.026% 54.03% 9.87% 0.011%

From the table, it is easy to observe that the recurrent neural networks (GRU and LSTM) are
better in both precision and average return for this specific classification task with the exception of
the LightGBM. They are ranked from the highest to the lowest in the precision calculated on the test
set. Among them, the GRU model is better in almost every metrics compared to other models. For
the LightGBM models, they come second but only perform well for the short-only strategy in the
bearish market. Their long-only versions are quite worse compared to the other. As a result, we do
not value their performance that high. The LSTM model comes third but with the best performance

11

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in validation set and negative return in test set. It is likely that the LSTM models are overfitted in the
training phase. The logistic model, due to its simplicity, performs worse than most models but still
surprisingly better than the XGBoost. The XGBoost, despite its similar nature with the LightGBM,
actually performed way worse than all other models, with 2% precision lower (a noticeable margin)
than the 2nd worst one.

4 C ONCLUSION

Our analysis has pointed out that it is not inconceivable that the Bitcoin price history might contain
some predictive information. That information can even be enhanced through the use of several
popular technical indicators so that they can be exploited by quantitative methods to create a profitable
trading strategy. Our detailed results show that our prediction models using the machine learning
approach trained on the Binance cryptocurrency exchange can create the profits that are better than
the classic Buy-and-Hold strategy and provide much better precision than random guesses.
Our study has shown how several popular machine learning methods such as neural networks,
decision trees, and logistic regression performed on Bitcoin price trend prediction. The results turned
out that the neural networks did the best compared to other models, especially in the case of fewer
features. However, among several neural network architectures, the state-of-the-art CNNs did not
outperform other architectures with comparable complexity as we expected [5]. The recurrent neural
network, on the other hand, shows superior performance with the GRU architectures and, to a lesser
extent, the LSTM architectures. Between the two, the GRU performed better than LSTM. However,
due to the limited sample size, we can not arbitrarily conclude that the GRU is better than the LSTM.

12

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