A Framework for Crop Price Forecasting in Emerging Economies by Analyzing the Quality of Time-series Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust crop price forecasting framework for emerging economies that accounts for data quality issues and market variability, improving prediction accuracy and model stability.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework incorporating data quality analysis and context-based model selection for crop price prediction in India.

Findings

Significant accuracy improvements over standard techniques.

Effective handling of data errors and fluctuations.

Robust models for Tomato and Maize prices across markets.

Abstract

Accuracy of crop price forecasting techniques is important because it enables the supply chain planners and government bodies to take appropriate actions by estimating market factors such as demand and supply. In emerging economies such as India, the crop prices at marketplaces are manually entered every day, which can be prone to human-induced errors like the entry of incorrect data or entry of no data for many days. In addition to such human prone errors, the fluctuations in the prices itself make the creation of stable and robust forecasting solution a challenging task. Considering such complexities in crop price forecasting, in this paper, we present techniques to build robust crop price prediction models considering various features such as (i) historical price and market arrival quantity of crops, (ii) historical weather data that influence crop production and transportation, (iii) data quality-related features obtained by performing statistical analysis. We additionally propose a framework for context-based model selection and retraining considering factors such as model stability, data quality metrics, and trend analysis of crop prices. To show the efficacy of the proposed approach, we show experimental results on two crops - Tomato and Maize for 14 marketplaces in India and demonstrate that the proposed approach not only improves accuracy metrics significantly when compared against the standard forecasting techniques but also provides robust models.