Data Analysis of Bitcoin, Litecoin and DASH — and App v10 released

Yesterday, late into the night, while lying in bed I was doing my favorite ritual: data analysis. I was going through recent events on the general chart, looking for interesting things. Here’s a short summary of what I’ve found.

Below is a screenshot of BTC’s price (orange area) of 12 days since March 5th (00:00 UTC) — each interval consists of 3-hours worth of data (aggregated). The dark red line is the (delta) trading volume. What we notice is that the trading volume has these aggressive peaks and valleys (where its value drops/grows rapidly). But It looks somewhat cyclic, meaning there is some repeating pattern in there but it’s very raw (due to the large 3h interval). This does not tell us much, but …

Now, let me add another dataset to the chart: a “flashy orange line”, which represents the news mentions. A news mention is an article published on some major channel (e.g. CNN, CNBC, BBC, …) and talks about the selected cryptocurrency (Bitcoun in our case). What’s remarkable is that this line also appears to be cyclic, it has similar aggressive peaks/valleys. But what’s even cooler is that a peak in trading volume matches a valley in the news mentions — and vice versa as well.

This is appears to be true for a majority of the peaks/valleys on this chart, with a few exceptions, such as the two large peaks just a few hours after “Feb 26” (see next image). Since we also have SMA size set to 3 — it means that these two lines/graphs are “lagging” by 3 hours compared to the price — — now look at what happened to the price 3 hours prior to these matching peaks, it went up quite rapidly. It could be that the market was pushed/influenced, as a result the price went up quite a lot. Maybe in the future, once we have more data, we could have a better version of what happened here — and we also might use these findings to make better predictions.

On the next screenshot I’ve also added the social mentions (blue graph). These are the number of social mentions related to Bitcoin (BTC). What’s interesting here is that it’s cyclic as well and to some degree in-phase with the news sentiments graph.

Here’s something else, on the screenshot below I’ve set the history size to 20 days (instead of 12) — everything else is the same. But now I’ve shown another graph, namely “news sentiments”. News sentiments are the results obtained from our sentiment analysis system, which analyses news articles to determine whether they are positive/negative. I haven’t noticed this before, and it’s not easy to see it on first sight, but it seems like these sentiments “predict” the future price:

It’s not easy to see what I mean in its original form, so let me break it up into pieces using Photoshop:

By slicing up the red graph (the sentiments data), and by shifting it by several days, we see how the red line matches “some” regions of the price’s data. This is a nice find, but probably completely useless. We shifted the sentiment graph by more than 3 days, so in essence this line makes predictions 3 days into the future. I haven’t calculated the accuracy of this since we don’t have enough data to verify this find. But I wouldn’t rely on this too much — yet it’s still a cool find :) .

Once I was done with Bitcoin, I also had a look at some of our other altcoins. In the case of “DASH”, I noticed that social mentions (and social sentiments) graphs appear to follow the price, and to some degree predicting it:

Litecoin is also highly influenced by social media as seen here:

For most coins I’ve noticed that trading volume was of less importance as a prediction indicator. Meaning, social mentions data appears to be a good and better predictor. Finally I went to sleep.

App version 10

After having woken up, I started working on on our app and made some pretty big changes. Here’s a summary:

• New settings layout.
• AD: different levels (+disable option).
• Predictions: different frequencies (+disable option).
• New version update notifier.
• Bugfix: missing notifications.

New settings layout: The layout changes and most of the switches are replaced by a drop down lists.

Prediction notification frequency

The first one is prediction frequency, here you can select which type of prediction notifications you would like to receive: 10min or the 60min (hourly) predictions. On the Forecast screen, on the app, you can always view both type of predictions by changing the interval — this frequency setting only affects the push notification. You may also disable this if you don’t want to receive any update/notification when a new prediction is generated.

The text/message of these notifications has also been changed, below is an example of new version. The algorithm that makes up the message solely uses the average line (the middle prediction) — it does not generate a message by using two of the extremes (the max or min lines). So in this example, the first predicted value (of the avg. line) is higher than the current/actual price, that’s why the message states that the price might increase within the next interval.

Anomaly detection level

Now we can choose which level of notifications we want to receive.

• Critical (default): this will only notify you of the most critical events, e.g.:

• Warnings+: this notifies us of quite important events, including critical ones:

• Info+: this notifies us of Warnings, Criticals and less important events:

• All (debug): this will notify us on every one the above events, even when there is nothing going on. The lowest level is called “stability”, i.e. when the price is quite stable:

You may notice that what the system considers as “critical” or “stable” is not necessarily a critical or stable event for you and me. So in the near future I will definitely be tweaking the system and make it more customizable.

New version notifier

As of now on, a notification label will appear when a new version has become available. I believe this is necessary to let people know to update as soon as possible. Because when another big change happens, old components (on previous versions) may no longer work correctly.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!
- Ilya Nevolin

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