Forecasting crude oil price using LSTM neural networks

As a key input factor in industrial production, the price volatility of crude oil often brings about economic volatility, so forecasting crude oil price has always been a pivotal issue in economics. In our study, we constructed an LSTM (short for Long Short-Term Memory neural network) model to conduct this forecasting based on data from February 1986 to May 2021. An ANN (short for Artificial Neural Network) model and a typical ARIMA (short for Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) model are taken as the comparable models. The results show that, first, the LSTM model has strong generalization ability, with stable applicability in forecasting crude oil prices with different timescales. Second, as compared to other models, the LSTM model generally has higher forecasting accuracy for crude oil prices with different timescales. Third, an LSTM model-derived shorter forecast price timescale corresponds to a lower forecasting accuracy. Therefore, given a longer forecast crude oil price timescale, other factors may need to be included in the model.