The economic growth of every nation is highly related to its electricity infrastructure, network, and availability since electricity has become the central part of everyday life in this modern world. Hence, the global demand for electricity for residential and commercial purposes has seen an incredible increase. On the other side, electricity prices keep fluctuating over the past years and not mentioning the inadequacy in electricity generation to meet global demand. As a solution to this, numerous studies aimed at estimating future electrical energy demand for residential and commercial purposes to enable electricity generators, distributors, and suppliers to plan effectively ahead and promote energy conservation among the users. Notwithstanding, load forecasting is one of the major problems facing the power industry since the inception of electric power. The current study tried to undertake a systematic and critical review of about seventy-seven (77) relevant previous works reported in academic journals over nine years (2010–2020) in electricity demand forecasting. Specifically, attention was given to the following themes: (i) The forecasting algorithms used and their fitting ability in this field, (ii) the theories and factors affecting electricity consumption and the origin of research work, (iii) the relevant accuracy and error metrics applied in electricity load forecasting, and (iv) the forecasting period. The results revealed that 90% out of the top nine models used in electricity forecasting was artificial intelligence based, with artificial neural network (ANN) representing 28%. In this scope, ANN models were primarily used for short-term electricity forecasting where electrical energy consumption patterns are complicated. Concerning the accuracy metrics used, it was observed that root-mean-square error (RMSE) (38%) was the most used error metric among electricity forecasters, followed by mean absolute percentage error MAPE (35%). The study further revealed that 50% of electricity demand forecasting was based on weather and economic parameters, 8.33% on household lifestyle, 38.33% on historical energy consumption, and 3.33% on stock indices. Finally, we recap the challenges and opportunities for further research in electricity load forecasting locally and globally.

Stock-market prediction using machine-learning technique aims at developing effective and efficient models that can provide a better and higher rate of prediction accuracy. Numerous ensemble regressors and classifiers have been applied in stock market predictions, using different combination techniques. However, three precarious issues come in mind when constructing ensemble classifiers and regressors. The first concerns with the choice of base regressor or classifier technique adopted. The second concerns the combination techniques used to assemble multiple regressors or classifiers and the third concerns with the quantum of regressors or classifiers to be ensembled. Subsequently, the number of relevant studies scrutinising these previously mentioned concerns are limited. In this study, we performed an extensive comparative analysis of ensemble techniques such as boosting, bagging, blending and super learners (stacking). Using Decision Trees (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Neural Network (NN), we constructed twenty-five (25) different ensembled regressors and classifiers. We compared their execution times, accuracy, and error metrics over stock-data from Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE-SENSEX) and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), from January 2012 to December 2018. The study outcome shows that stacking and blending ensemble techniques offer higher prediction accuracies (90–100%) and (85.7–100%) respectively, compared with that of bagging (53–97.78%) and boosting (52.7–96.32%). Furthermore, the root means square error (RMSE) recorded by stacking (0.0001–0.001) and blending (0.002–0.01) shows a better fit of ensemble classifiers and regressors based on these two techniques in market analyses compared with bagging (0.01–0.11) and boosting (0.01–0.443). Finally, the results undoubtedly suggest that an innovative study in the domain of stock market direction prediction ought to include ensemble techniques in their sets of algorithms.

The availability of digital technology in the hands of every citizenry worldwide makes an available unprecedented massive amount of data. The capability to process these gigantic amounts of data in real-time with Big Data Analytics (BDA) tools and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms carries many paybacks. However, the high number of free BDA tools, platforms, and data mining tools makes it challenging to select the appropriate one for the right task. This paper presents a comprehensive mini-literature review of ML in BDA, using a keyword search; a total of 1512 published articles was identified. The articles were screened to 140 based on the study proposed novel taxonomy. The study outcome shows that deep neural networks (15%), support vector machines (15%), artificial neural networks (14%), decision trees (12%), and ensemble learning techniques (11%) are widely applied in BDA. The related applications fields, challenges, and most importantly the openings for future research, are detailed.

The stock market is very unstable and volatile due to several factors such as public sentiments, economic factors and more. Several Petabytes volumes of data are generated every second from different sources, which affect the stock market. A fair and efficient fusion of these data sources (factors) into intelligence is expected to offer better prediction accuracy on the stock market. However, integrating these factors from different data sources as one dataset for market analysis is seen as challenging because they come in a different format (numerical or text). In this study, we propose a novel multi-source information-fusion stock price prediction framework based on a hybrid deep neural network architecture (Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)) named IKN-ConvLSTM. Precisely, we design a predictive framework to integrate stock-related information from six (6) heterogeneous sources. Secondly, we construct a base model using CNN, and random search algorithm as a feature selector to optimise our initial training parameters. Finally, a stacked LSTM network is fine-tuned by using the tuned parameter (features) from the base-model to enhance prediction accuracy. Our approach's emperical evaluation was carried out with stock data (January 3, 2017, to January 31, 2020) from the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE). The results show a good prediction accuracy of 98.31%, specificity (0.9975), sensitivity (0.8939%) and F-score (0.9672) of the amalgamated dataset compared with the distinct dataset. Based on the study outcome, it can be concluded that efficient information fusion of different stock price indicators as a single data source for market prediction offer high prediction accuracy than individual data sources.