2010) that explained also advantages of fuzzy and
fractal methods in comparizon to traditional methods.
A simple fractal system was published by Castillo
(Castillo and Melin, 2007). Compared to our sys-
tem, it uses a normal distribution of price differences
and does not use any changing of fractal features. In
our previous paper (Kroha and Lauschke, 2010), we
showed that the price differences are not normally dis-
tributed. Unfortunately, a direct comparison between
the two systems is impossible, because Castillo’s and
our system use different test environments (Castillo
and Melin, 2007).
Concerning fuzzy technology, there exist several
other applications of Takagi-Sugeno inference for
time series prediction. For example, the work of An-
dreu and Angelov (Andreu and Angelov, 2010), who
proposed an evolving Takagi-Sugeno algorithm for
time series prediction of NN GCI datasets. NN GCI
is a competition of classification and prediction al-
gorithms. The key difference (aside from the data
they use), is that they use a different rule generation
method. They did not use c-mean clustering but linear
clustering. However, the reason why they used fuzzy
clustering is the same: to achieve data-based rule gen-
eration and to avoid static, upfront rulesets.
The field of stock market prediction is filled with
hundreds of forecasting methods. Not all of those are
scientific or viable, but there exist several approaches
that are backed exactly. One example is the techni-
cal analysis that has also been tested as one of alter-
natives for generating input parameters for clustering
in our previous paper (Kroha and Lauschke, 2010).
Interestingly, in our experiments described in (Kroha
and Lauschke, 2010), the technical analysis module
performed worse than fractal analysis and the fuzzy
logic modules.
To classify the market type, we used a news-based
approach in (Kroha and Nienhold, 2010). We clas-
sified stock market news stories into good, bad, and
neutral news and used then the ratio of these values
for prediction. We used the same approach in (Kroha
et al., 2010) but using a support vector machine for
the classification.
We did not find any previous works concerning the
fractal dimension changes suitable for classification.
3 FUZZY AND FRACTAL
CLASSIFICATION
In this section, we will only very briefly describe the
fuzzy and fractal features that we used in our sys-
tem (Kroha and Lauschke, 2010) before we introduce
the improvement by changing fractal dimension de-
scribed as our contribution in this paper. Our sys-
tem has the following three components: fractal di-
mension module, c-mean clustering algorithm, and
Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy inference module.
The fractal dimension module calculates the frac-
tal features of time series. They describe how chaotic
a given time series is. There are several ways to define
and calculate the fractal dimension. We used box di-
mension and Hurst coefficient according to their def-
initions in (Mandelbrot, 1983). Details concerning
the fractal features of market can be found in (Peters,
1994) and in (Peters, 1996).
In addition, we had to use a correlation coefficient
with a line to indicate whether the time series values
are going up or down.
A fuzzy classifier uses three main components:
fuzzyfication, fuzzy inference and defuzzyfication.
The number of classes need to be defined.
Fuzzyfication is the process of transforming sharp
input data into fuzzy data using a membership func-
tion. The fuzzyfier determines what kind of cluster
is more probable for a given input value describing
the time series. The clustering algorithm c-mean dy-
namically calculates the membership function for the
fuzzyfication process. As the input of the c-mean
clustering of time series, we used a triple consisting of
box dimension, Hurst coefficient, and correlation co-
efficient as mentioned above. Futher, it prepares data
for generation inferrence rules dynamically. More de-
tails can be obtained from (Castillo and Melin, 2003).
Then, using fuzzy inference according to the dy-
namically generated rules, a prediction value is in-
ferred. The rules are generated dynamically on the
basic of the input data. For this purpose, we used
the Takagi-Sugeno inference method (Kluska, 2009).
This function is valid for a certain dataset, it is, how-
ever, dynamic and individually generated for each
dataset.
To interpret the output prediction value, it will be
defuzzified. In our case, its definition interval is di-
vided on three parts because we classify into three
classes. The prediction value membership to a subin-
terval indicates whether the classified time series will
be associated with the class BUY, SELL, or HOLD.
Time series of the class BUY have more common fea-
tures with time series that were going up in the past,
and time series of the class SELL have more common
features with time series that were going down in the
past under similar conditions. The architecture of our
time series classification system is in Fig. 1.
THE CLASSIFICATION OF TIME SERIES UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF SCALED NOISE
335