Demand forecasting of perishable farm products using support vector machine

  • Authors:
  • XiaoFang Du;StephenC. H. Leung;JinLong Zhang;K. K. Lai

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Automotive Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430074, China;Department of Management Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong;School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China;Department of Management Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Systems Science
  • Year:
  • 2013

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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.