Optimizing Time Series Forecasting: A Comparative Study of Adam and Nesterov Accelerated Gradient on LSTM and GRU networks Using Stock Market data

Several studies have discussed the impact different optimization techniques in the context of time series forecasting across different Neural network architectures. This paper examines the effectiveness of Adam and Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG) optimization techniques on LSTM and GRU neural networks for time series prediction, specifically stock market time-series. Our study was done by training LSTM and GRU models with two different optimization techniques - Adam and Nesterov Accelerated Gradient (NAG), comparing and evaluating their performance on Apple Inc's closing price data over the last decade. The GRU model optimized with Adam produced the lowest RMSE, outperforming the other model-optimizer combinations in both accuracy and convergence speed. The GRU models with both optimizers outperformed the LSTM models, whilst the Adam optimizer outperformed the NAG optimizer for both model architectures. The results suggest that GRU models optimized with Adam are well-suited for practitioners in time-series prediction, more specifically stock price time series prediction producing accurate and computationally efficient models. The code for the experiments in this project can be found at https://github.com/AhmadMak/Time-Series-Optimization-Research Keywords: Time-series Forecasting, Neural Network, LSTM, GRU, Adam Optimizer, Nesterov Accelerated Gradient (NAG) Optimizer