Technology Forecasting Using Deep Learning Neural Network: Taking the Case of Robotics

Technology forecasting not only helps business managers to make the right decisions but also helps researchers to grasp the direction of technology development. Technology forecasting, which facilitates the identification of the development technologies with high potential, can be an effective tool to support the management and plan for the future research activities. For this purpose, this paper firstly constructs Multi-modal input based on deep learning (MIDL) text classification model to extract relevant SCI papers from Web of Science database from 1996 to 2019 for topic classification, and then apply the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks to build an EEMD-LSTM technology forecasting model to predict the future development of each research field. Besides, we verify the validity of the method by taking robotics as an example in this paper. The results show that the accuracy, recall and F1 of MIDL text classification model are 0.826, 0.822 and 0.824 respectively. As compared with the optimal results of other classification models, the accuracy, recall and F1 are improved by 4.1%, 3.5%, and 3.8% respectively. The mean MAPE of the EEMD-LSTM model is 7%, which is 11% lower than ARIMA, 8% lower than LSTM, and 10% lower than 2-layer-LSTM.