Exchange Rate Prediction Under Data Volatility: A Comparison Of Deep Learning Techniques
Abstract
This Accurate prediction of exchange rates is of critical importance for economic policy related decision making. This study employs a deep learning based framework to model exchange rate dynamics by explicitly accounting for the inherently nonlinear, and regime sensitive nature of financial time series. Unlike traditional artificial neural network approaches that overlook temporal dependencies, recurrent neural network architectures are capable of directly modeling long term time dependencies. Accordingly, this study applies Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models to predict the USD/TRY and EUR/TRY exchange rate series. The empirical analysis is conducted using data from the Turkish economy across three distinct subperiods, representing a relatively stable regime and two high-volatility regimes. Hyperparameters are independently optimized for each model and regime with grid search. Predictive performance is evaluated using Mean Absolute Error, Root Mean Squared Error, and Mean Absolute Percentage Error, with Diebold Mariano tests confirming statistical significance and formal benchmark comparisons against ARIMA and random walk models. Results indicate that no single architecture dominates across all conditions: GRU consistently outperforms competitors during the Crisis period for both exchange rates, while LSTM and BiLSTM perform best during COVID19 for USD/TRY, and GRU maintains its advantage for EUR/TRY. Diebold Mariano tests confirm that 89% of pairwise performance differences are statistically significant. Robustness analysis using lag-3 specifications supports that regime-dependent patterns are not artifacts of input structure. By incorporating volatility regimes, statistical testing, and econometric benchmarks, this study demonstrates the practical importance of regime-aware model selection for exchange rate forecasting in emerging market economies.
Keywords
Supporting Institution
Ethical Statement
References
- Abedin, M. Z., Moon, M., Hassan, M., & Ha´jek, P. (2021). Deep learning-based exchange rate prediction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Annals of Operations Research, 1–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-021-04420-6
- Adam, K., Smagulova, K. and James, A. P. (2018). Memristive LSTM network hardware architecture for time series predictive modeling problems. arXiv preprint arxiv:1809.03119v1. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1809.03119
- Altan, S¸. (2008). Doviz kuru ongoru performansı için alternatif bir yaklaşım: yapay sinir ağı. Journal of Gazi University Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, 10(2), 141–160. https://izlik.org/JA87WB59FC
- Ang, A., & Bekaert, G. (2002). Regime switches in interest rates. Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, 20(2), 163-182. https://doi.org/10.1198/073500102317351930
- Ayoobi, N., Sharifrazi, D., Alizadehsani, R., Shoeibi, A., Gorriz, J.M., Moosaei, H., Khosravi, A., Nahavandi, S., Gholamzadeh Chofreh, A., Goni, F.A., Klemeˇs, J.J. & Mosavi, A., (2021). Time series forecasting of new cases and new deaths rate for COVID-19 using deep learning methods. The results in Physics, 27, 104495. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rinp.2021.104495
- Azzouni, A. & Pujolle, G. (2017). A Long short-term memory recurrent neural network framework for network traffic matrix prediction. arxiv preprint arxiv:1705.05690v2. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1705.05690
- Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., & Bengio, Y. (2015). Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2015). https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473
- Bian, G., McAleer, M., & Wong, W. K. (2013). Robust estimation and forecasting of the capital asset pricing model. Annals of Financial Economics, 8(02), 1350007. https://doi.org/10.1142/S2010495213500073
Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
Data Management and Data Science (Other)
Journal Section
Research Article
Authors
Publication Date
March 14, 2026
Submission Date
December 13, 2025
Acceptance Date
March 8, 2026
Published in Issue
Year 2026 Number: 6