Time series forecasting of agricultural products’ sales volumes based on seasonal long short-term memory

In this paper, we propose seasonal long short-term memory (SLSTM), which is a method for predicting the sales of agricultural products, to stabilize supply and demand. The SLSTM model is trained using the seasonality attributes of week, month, and quarter as additional inputs to historical time-series data. The seasonality attributes are entered into the SLSTM network model individually or in combination. The performance of the proposed SLSTM model was compared with those of auto_arima, Prophet, and a standard LSTM in terms of three performance metrics (mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and normalization mean absolute error (NMAE)). The experimental results show that the error rate of the proposed SLSTM model is significantly lower than those of other classical methods.