A Novel Maize Futures Price Prediction Model based on EEMD-CNN-IGRU

Maize, a significant global food crop, is essential in agriculture and the economy. The price of maize futures is affected by many factors, and its data is a nonlinear, unstable, and long-term correlation, so it is difficult to predict it accurately. Accordingly, this paper presents a combined model based on Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Improved Gated Recurrent Unit (IGRU). EEMD decomposes the maize price data to produce multiple Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) components and residual sequences. Subsequently, the noisy IMF components are removed, and the remaining IMF components are reconstructed into low, medium, and high frequencies. The CNN is tasked with the extraction of eigenvalues for these components. The IGRU improves in two key respects on the original Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) model. First, it enhances the update and reset gates. Second, it incorporates the Self-Attention (SA) module. Thereby, the model's predictive capabilities are improved. This study uses the primary maize futures trading data from the Dalian Commodity Exchange as the experimental data. A comparative analysis of the EEMD-CNN-IGRU model with seven baseline models shows that it outperforms other models in all evaluation indexes.