A new method of large-scale short-term forecasting of agricultural commodity prices: illustrated by the case of agricultural markets in Beijing

In order to forecast prices of arbitrary agricultural commodity in different wholesale markets in one city, this paper proposes a mixed model, which combines ARIMA model and PLS regression method based on time and space factors. This mixed model is able to obtain the forecasting results of weekly prices of agricultural commodities in different markets. Meanwhile, this paper sets up variables to measure the price changing trend based on the change of exogenous variables and prices, thus achieves the warning of daily price changes using neural networks. The model is tested with the data of several types of agricultural commodities and error analysis is made. The result shows that the mixed model is more accurate in forecasting agricultural commodity prices than each single model does, and has better accuracy in warning values. The mixed model, to some extent, forecasts the daily price changes of agricultural commodities.