A hybrid FinBERT-LSTM framework for Bitcoin price forecasting using news sentiment and technical indicators
This study proposes a hybrid forecasting framework that integrates sentiment analysis with deep learning to predict Bitcoin’s hourly and daily closing prices. Hourly BTC/USD market data spanning June 2021 to November 2025 were combined with approximately 326,000 Bitcoin-related news headlines published over the same period. Sentiment scores in the range of [-1, +1] were generated for each headline using FinBERT, a transformer-based language model trained on financial texts, and were subsequently integrated with technical indicators such as trading volume, MACD, and RSI. The resulting combined feature set was modeled using an LSTM network to capture temporal dependencies. Empirical results demonstrate that sentiment-enhanced hybrid models consistently outperform models based solely on technical indicators across RMSE, MAE, MAPE, and R² metrics. The hourly hybrid model achieved the best performance, with an RMSE of 1,009 USD and an R² of 99.23%. Furthermore, a 30-day out-of-sample real-time evaluation yielded an RMSE of 941 USD. The consistency between in-sample and out-of-sample results indicates that the proposed framework maintains stable predictive performance over time.