An Analysis on Forecasting Inflation Rate in the Philippines: A Recurrent Neural Network Method Approach

Abstract

Inflation rate is the proceeding rise within the common level of costs of products and services in an economy over a certain span of time. In 2018, the Philippines has the highest inflation rate among the 10 South East Asian countries. The objective of this research is to forecast the inflation rate of the Philippines for the next five years (2019-2023). Also, the researchers compared the results obtained from the Multiple Linear Regression and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) performed in MATLAB to determine which of these two models will be the better model in forecasting inflation rate. In this study, the researchers observed the behavior of the Inflation Rate(y) and its economic factors such as Import (x1), Export (x2), Money Supply (x3), Gross Domestic Product (x4), Gross National Product (x5), Expenditure (x6) and Exchange Rate (x7). Using Multiple Linear Regression, this study determined that the significant predictors are Money Supply (x3) and Expenditures (x6). By evaluating the forecast efficiency of the two methods, the researchers concluded that Multilayered Recurrent Neural Network outperforms Multiple Linear Regression in predicting inflation rate of the Philippines. This paper can be useful to the Philippine Government on their decisions about monetary policy making since forecasting the inflation rate has a huge importance and impact in conducting monetary policy.