Incorporating deep learning and news topic modeling for forecasting pork prices: The case of South Korea

Abstract

Knowing the prices of agricultural commodities in advance can provide governments, farmers, and consumers with various advantages, including a clearer understanding of the market, planning business strategies, and adjusting personal finances. Thus, there have been many efforts to predict the future prices of agricultural commodities in the past. For example, researchers have attempted to predict prices by extracting price quotes, using sentiment analysis algorithms, through statistical information from news stories, and by other means. In this paper, we propose a methodology that predicts the daily retail price of pork in the South Korean domestic market based on news articles by incorporating deep learning and topic modeling techniques. To do this, we utilized news articles and retail price data from 2010 to 2019. We initially applied a topic modeling technique to obtain relevant keywords that can express price fluctuations. Based on these keywords, we constructed prediction models using statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods. The experimental results show that there is a strong relationship between the meaning of news articles and the price of pork.