A truncated Gaussian distribution based multi-scale segment-wise fusion transformer model for multi-step commodity price forecasting

Accurately forecasting commodity price trends is crucial for producers, market participants, and related enterprises to make informed decisions regarding production planning and scheduling. However, achieving high accuracy in multi-step forecasting poses significant challenges due to the unique financial characteristics inherent in commodities. Thus, this paper proposes a novel truncated Gaussian distribution based multi-scale segment-wise fusion Transformer for multi-step commodity price forecasting. First, a multi-scale segment-wise fusion module, which capture the time dependencies from different time granularity, is designed to describe the time-varying trend characteristics of commodity prices. Second, considering the characteristics of price range fluctuation and truncation, a truncated Gaussian distribution is introduced to describe price uncertainty. Last, to evaluate the proposed method’s effectiveness, extensive experiments are conducted using real data on energy chemical product prices. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method accurately captures price change trends and effectively estimates price uncertainty. Compared to the widely adopted Autoformer, our approach achieves approximately 30% reductions in both root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) metrics. Additionally, it exhibits certain advantages over the current state-of-the-art (SOTA). In the 20-step and 60-step multi-step prediction tasks, the proposed method achieves RMSE values of 91.18 and 142.94, respectively, surpassing the current SOTA. The introduced research framework provides valuable insights for decision-makers engaged in analyzing and forecasting commodity markets. The code is available on https://github.com/dean-ob/TGD-MSSF.