Meta-Learning Enhanced Trade Forecasting: A Neural Framework Leveraging Efficient Multicommodity STL Decomposition

Abstract

In the dynamic global trade environment, accurately predicting trade values of diverse commodities is challenged by unpredictable economic and political changes. This study introduces the Meta-TFSTL framework, an innovative neural model that integrates Meta-Learning Enhanced Trade Forecasting with efficient multicommodity STL decomposition to adeptly navigate the complexities of forecasting. Our approach begins with STL decomposition to partition trade value sequences into seasonal, trend, and residual elements, identifying a potential 10-month economic cycle through the Ljung–Box test. The model employs a dual-channel spatiotemporal encoder for processing these components, ensuring a comprehensive grasp of temporal correlations. By constructing spatial and temporal graphs leveraging correlation matrices and graph embeddings and introducing fused attention and multitasking strategies at the decoding phase, Meta-TFSTL surpasses benchmark models in performance. Additionally, integrating meta-learning and fine-tuning techniques enhances shared knowledge across import and export trade predictions. Ultimately, our research significantly advances the precision and efficiency of trade forecasting in a volatile global economic scenario.