A Comprehensive Survey of Cryptocurrency Forecasting: Methods, Trends, and Challenges

This comprehensive survey paper explores the diverse landscape of cryptocurrency forecasting, tracing its evolution from an alternative to traditional monetary systems to its significant growth in the global financial arena. It consolidates existing research by categorizing and analyzing 234 scholarly articles, organizing them into machine learning, deep learning, deep reinforcement learning, and statistical methodologies, and evaluating the related metrics. The case study titled “Examining the performance differences between backtesting and forward testing” highlights the challenges investors face, as strategies that appear effective in backtesting often fail in practical use. Another case study, “Social Data Exploration in Cryptocurrency Trends,” examines how social media data can provide insights into market movements and investor sentiment, revealing the impact of social trends on cryptocurrency prices. The findings section provides a detailed view, illuminating trends such as yearly publication rates, methodological distributions, input features, training/testing splits, the total number of data samples considered, and forecasting time horizons. This survey paper serves as a valuable resource, providing researchers and investors with a solid foundation for understanding and navigating the dynamic field of cryptocurrency forecasting.