Demand forecasting of perishable farm products using support vector machine

Abstract

This article presents a new algorithm for forecasting demand for perishable farm products, based on the support vector machine (SVM) method. Since SVMs have greater generalisation performance and guarantee global minima for given training data, it is believed that support vector regression will perform well for forecasting demand for perishable farm products. In order to improve forecasting precision (FP), this article quantifies the factors affecting the sales forecast of perishable farm products based on the fuzzy theory, which is suitable for real situations. Numerical experiments show that forecasting systems with SVMs and fuzzy theory outperform the radial basis function neural network, based on the criteria of day absolute error, relative mean error and FP. Since there is no structured way to choose the free parameters of SVMs, the variational range of free parameters and the effects of the parameters on prediction performance are discussed in this article. Analysis of experimental results proves that it is advantageous to apply SVMs forecasting system in perishable farm products demand forecasting.

Keywords:

• support vector machine
• perishable farm products
• demand forecasting
• fuzzy theory
• kernel function

Acknowledgments

The work described in this study was fully supported by a grant from City University of Hong Kong (project no. 7001909).