Potato Consumption Forecasting Based on a Hybrid Stacked Deep Learning Model

Abstract

Potato consumption forecasting is crucial for several stakeholders in the food market. Due to the market flexibility, the farmers can manipulate the volumes planted for a given type of produce to reduce costs and improve revenue. Consequently, it means that establishing optimal inventories or inventory levels is possible and critical in that sense for the sellers to avoid either inadequate inventory or excessive inventories that may lead to wastage. In addition, governments can predict future food deficits and put measures in place to guarantee that they have a steady supply of food some of the time, especially in regions that involve the use of potatoes. Increased potato-eating anticipation has advantages for the sellers and buyers of the potatoes. The experiments of this study employed various machine learning and deep learning (DL) models that comprise stacked long short-term memory (Stacked LSTM), convolutional neural network (CNN), random forest (RF), support vector regressor (SVR), K-nearest neighbour regressor (KNN), bagging regressor (BR), and dummy regressor (DR). During the study, it was discovered that the Stacked LSTM model had superior performance compared to the other models. The Stacked LSTM model achieved a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.0081, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.0801, a median absolute error (MedAE) of 0.0755, and a coefficient of determination (R2) value of 98.90%. These results demonstrate that our algorithms can reliably forecast global potato consumption until the year 2030.