The trading rulesets I use, don't try to predict price. They just try to predict the sign of the first derivative of price. Lots of times they have no actionable prediction and so they say "Do Nothing - take no action."
Are they linear? Well, no, not really. In the same sense that the absolute value function is not linear: ABS(x + y) != ABS(x) + ABS(y).
Some of my rulesets use functions involving exponents other than one (for example: some of them calculate the standard deviation, which includes the exponent "2" so it cannot be linear). And other rulesets use the max() and min() functions, which are certainly not linear. "The Highest High of the past ten price bars" is not a linear function at all.