Gross domestic product (GDP) is an important index reflecting the economic development of a region. Accurate GDP prediction of developing regions can provide technical support for sustainable urban development and economic policy formulation. In this paper, a novel multi-factor three-step feature selection and deep learning framework are proposed for regional GDP prediction. The core modeling process is mainly composed of the following three steps: In Step I, the feature crossing algorithm is used to deeply excavate hidden feature information of original datasets and fully extract key information. In Step II, BorutaRF and Q-learning algorithms analyze the deep correlation between extracted features and targets from two different perspectives and determine the features with the highest quality. In Step III, selected features are used as the input of TCN (Temporal convolutional network) to build a GDP prediction model and obtain final prediction results. Based on the experimental analysis of three datasets, the following conclusions can be drawn: (1) The proposed three-stage feature selection method effectively improves the prediction accuracy of TCN by more than 10%. (2) The proposed GDP prediction framework proposed in the paper has achieved better forecasting performance than 14 benchmark models. In addition, the MAPE values of the models are lower than 5% in all cases.

Gross domestic product (GDP) can effectively reflect the situation of economic development and resource allocation in different regions. The high-precision GDP prediction technology lays a foundation for the sustainable development of regional resources and the proposal of economic management policies.To build an accurate GDP prediction model, this paper proposed a new multi-predictor ensemble decision framework based on deep reinforcement learning. Overall modeling consists of the following steps: Firstly, GRU, TCN, and DBN are the main predictors to train three GDP forecasting models with their characteristics. Then, the DQN algorithm effectively analyses the adaptability of these three neural networks to different GDP datasets to obtain an ensemble model. Finally, by adaptive optimization of the ensemble weight coefficients of these three neural networks, the DQN algorithm got the final GDP prediction results. Through three groups of experimental cases from China, the following conclusions can be drawn: (1) the DQN algorithm can obtain excellent experimental results in ensemble learning, which effectively improves the prediction performance of single predictors by more than 10 %. (2) The ensemble multi-predictor region GDP prediction framework based on deep reinforcement learning can achieve better prediction results than 18 benchmark models. In addition, the MAPE value of the proposed model is lower than 4.2% in all cases.