<![CDATA[Introduction: Gold is widely regarded as a long-term store of value and a hedge against inflation, yet its short-term price volatility creates significant challenges for investment decision-making and requires accurate forecasting methods. This study evaluates a hybrid deep learning approach combining Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to capture both short-term fluctuations and long-term temporal dependencies in gold price movements. Method: Historical daily gold closing-price data comprising 2,735 observations from 2015 to 2025 were collected and normalized using Min-Max Scaling. The data were divided chronologically into 80% training and 20% testing sets. A hybrid CNN–LSTM model was trained using the Adam optimizer with a learning rate of 0.0001, dropout of 0.2, a timestep of 30, and batch sizes of 16, 32, and 64. Model performance was evaluated using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). Results and Discussion: The batch size of 16 achieved the best performance, producing the lowest validation RMSE of 0.0929 and an RMSE of 11.518535% after denormalization, outperforming batch sizes of 32 and 64. The model also followed actual gold-price trends more closely, while the inclusion of Dense and Dropout layers improved generalization. Conclusion: The CNN–LSTM hybrid model, particularly with a batch size of 16, provides an effective approach for forecasting volatile gold prices by integrating local pattern extraction with long-term temporal modeling.]]>
