<![CDATA[Bitcoin’s extreme volatility continues to challenge accurate forecasting and risk management. Traditional econometric approaches struggle with the nonlinear and shifting dynamics of cryptocurrency markets, while deep learning models such as the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) often lack interpretability and adaptability to regime changes. To address these limitations, this study introduces a hybrid Gaussian Hidden Markov Model–Gated Recurrent Unit (HMM-GRU) framework for Bitcoin price forecasting. The HMM identifies latent market regimes from four years of daily closing prices and integrates these states as auxiliary features for the GRU network. Experimental results show that the hybrid model consistently surpasses the standalone GRU in predictive accuracy. Under the optimal configuration, HMM-GRU achieves a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1,557.33 and a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 1.42%, compared with 1,713.30 and 1.57% for GRU, representing an approximate 9% improvement in both absolute and relative error performance. The inclusion of regime-based features enables the model to better capture market transitions and mitigate overfitting to short-term noise. Beyond performance gains, the proposed approach enhances interpretability by linking forecasts to identifiable market regimes. These findings highlight the value of combining statistical regime detection with deep learning for volatile financial assets, providing practical insights for both investors and researchers in time-series forecasting.]]>
