Prediction of Agricultural Commodities Futures Prices: A DQN-LSTM Method

This paper combines deep Q network (DQN) with long and short-term memory (LSTM) and proposes a novel hybrid deep learning method called DQN-LSTM framework. The proposed method aims to address the prediction of five Chinese agricultural commodities futures prices over different time duration. The DQN-LSTM applies the strategy enhancement of deep reinforcement learning to the structural parameter optimization of deep recurrent networks, and achieves the organic integration of two types of deep learning algorithms. The new framework has the capacity of self-optimization and learning of parameters, thus improving the performance of prediction by its own iteration, which shows great prospects for future application in financial prediction and other directions. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by comparing the effectiveness of the DQN-LSTM method with that of traditional predicting methods such as auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), support vector machine (SVR) and LSTM. The results show that the DQN-LSTM method can effectively optimize the traditional LSTM structural parameters through policy iteration of the deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which contributes to a better long and short-term prediction accuracy. In particular, the longer the prediction period, the more obvious the advantage of prediction accuracy of a DQN-LSTM method.