Forecasting Baltic Dry Index by Implementing Time-Series Decomposition and Data Augmentation Techniques

Purpose: This study aims to predict the dry cargo transportation market economy. The subject of this study is the BDI (Baltic Dry Index) time-series, an index representing the dry cargo transport market.Methods: In order to increase the accuracy of the BDI time-series, we have pre-processed the original time-series via time-series decomposition and data augmentation techniques and have used them for ANN learning. The ANN algorithms used are Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to compare and analyze the case of learning and predicting by applying time-series decomposition and data augmentation techniques. The forecast period aims to make short-term predictions at the time of   . The period to be studied is from '22. 01. 07 to '22. 08. 26.Results: Only for the case of the MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error) indicator, all ANN models used in the research has resulted in higher accuracy (1.422% on average) in multivariate prediction. Although it is not a remarkable improvement in prediction accuracy compared to uni-variate prediction results, it can be said that the improvement in ANN prediction performance has been achieved by utilizing time-series decomposition and data augmentation techniques that were significant and targeted throughout this study.Conclusion: Nevertheless, due to the nature of ANN, additional performance improvements can be expected according to the adjustment of the hyper-parameter. Therefore, it is necessary to try various applications of multiple learning algorithms and ANN optimization techniques. Such an approach would help solve problems with a small number of available data, such as the rapidly changing business environment or the current shipping market.