Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms for Stock Market Prediction During COVID-19 Outbreak

In the current period of time, when there is a havoc across the world due to COVID-19 virus outbreak, it becomes very important to foresee the impact of this pandemic on the world economy. This has attracted us to analyze and predict the stock market prices of some international IT international companies which provide employment to thousands of people and create revenue for many countries namely Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. In this study, we have implemented algorithms such as SVM and LSTM on stock market data to see if major IT companies see a rise or fall during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have also used ARIMA forecasting method to predict the stocks of above mentioned 4 companies. This paper provides a simple but original statistical analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock market risk for 4 major IT companies of the world. Results revealed that while some businesses like personal computers from Microsoft, I phone handsets, sale of luxury and fashion goods at Amazon has declined during the pandemic, thus leading to fall of stocks. However, some prominent other segments like online shopping, cloud computing and streaming video from Amazon, oversees Office, Dynamics, Skype, LinkedIn Intelligent Cloud from Microsoft, Google’s ad sales during the crisis and issue of cheap bonds by Apple came out to be the winning corporate strategies to fight the negative economic effect of COVID-19 and to stabilize the situation of stocks in coming months. This study may help investors and companies to sustain the tide of economic fall.