Forecasting Agricultural Commodity Prices Using Dual Input Attention LSTM

Fluctuations in agricultural commodity prices affect the supply and demand of agricultural commodities and have a significant impact on consumers. Accurate prediction of agricultural commodity prices would facilitate the reduction of risk caused by price fluctuations. This paper proposes a model called the dual input attention long short-term memory (DIA-LSTM) for the efficient prediction of agricultural commodity prices. DIA-LSTM is trained using various variables that affect the price of agricultural commodities, such as meteorological data, and trading volume data, and can identify the feature correlation and temporal relationships of multivariate time series input data. Further, whereas conventional models predominantly focus on the static main production area (which is selected for each agricultural commodity beforehand based on statistical data), DIA-LSTM utilizes the dynamic main production area (which is selected based on the production of agricultural commodities in each region). To evaluate DIA-LSTM, it was applied to the monthly price prediction of cabbage and radish in the South Korean market. Using meteorological information for the dynamic main production area, it achieved 2.8% to 5.5% lower mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) than that of the conventional model that uses meteorological information for the static main production area. Furthermore, it achieved 1.41% to 4.26% lower MAPE than that of benchmark models. Thus, it provides a new idea for agricultural commodity price forecasting and has the potential to stabilize the supply and demand of agricultural products.