Scrap steel price forecasting with neural networks for east,north,south,central,northeast,and southwest China and at the national level

Abstract

There is little doubt about importance of forecasting commodity prices to policy makers and diverse varieties of market participants. In this present work, we analyse price forecasting problems for scrap steel for east, north, south, central, northeast, and southwest China and at the national level with daily data during 08/23/2013–04/15/2021. We focus on exploration of usefulness of non-linear auto-regressive neural networks and examine forecasting performance based upon a variety of settings over algorithms for model estimations, numbers of hidden neurons and delays, and ratios for splitting the data into training, validation, and testing phases. We arrive at relatively simple models for the seven price series, which lead to forecasts of high accuracy and stabilities with relative root mean square errors below 0.85%. Our results could serve as standalone technical forecasts. They could be combined with other forecasts for forming perspectives of price trends and carrying out policy analysis.