GRU-Based Stock Price Forecasting with the Itô-RMSProp Optimizers

This study introduces Itô-RMSProp, a novel extension of the RMSProp optimizer inspired by Itô stochastic calculus, which integrates adaptive Gaussian noise into the update rule to enhance exploration and mitigate overfitting during training. We embed this optimizer within Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) networks for stock price forecasting, leveraging the GRU’s strength in modeling long-range temporal dependencies under nonstationary and noisy conditions. Extensive experiments on real-world financial datasets, including a detailed sensitivity analysis over a wide range of noise scaling parameters (ε), reveal that Itô-RMSProp-GRU consistently achieves superior convergence stability and predictive accuracy compared to classical RMSProp. Notably, the optimizer demonstrates remarkable robustness across all tested configurations, maintaining stable performance even under volatile market dynamics. These findings suggest that the synergy between stochastic differential equation frameworks and gated architectures provides a powerful paradigm for financial time series modeling. The paper also presents theoretical justifications and implementation details to facilitate reproducibility and future extensions.