DERN: Deep Ensemble Learning Model for Short- and Long-Term Prediction of Baltic Dry Index

The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) is a commonly utilized indicator of global shipping and trade activity. It influences stakeholders’ and ship-owners’ decisions respecting investments, chartering, operational plans, and export and import activities. Accurate prediction of the BDI is very challenging due to its volatility, non-stationarity, and complexity. To help stakeholders and ship-owners make sound short- and long-term maritime business decisions and avoid market risk, we performed short- and long-term predictions of BDI using an ensemble deep-learning approach. In this study, we propose to apply recurrent neural network models for BDI prediction. The state-of-the-art of sequential deep-learning models such as RNN, LSTM, and GRU are employed to predict one- and multi-step-ahead BDI values. In order to increase the accuracy, we assemble the models. In experiments, we compared our results with those of traditional methods such as ARIMA and MLP. The results showed that our proposed method outperforms ARIMA, MLP, RNN, LSTM, and GRU in both short- and long-term prediction of BDI.