To Rise or to Fall? Chinese Medicinal Materials Price Index Trend Prediction using GA-XGBoost Feature Selection and Bi-GRU Deep Learning

As the national Chinese medicine market develops, Chinese medicinal materials price index (CMMPI) trend is worthy of attention. Predicting future CMMPI trend plays a significant role in risk prevention, cultivation, and trade for farmers and investors. This study aims to design a high-precision model to predict the future trend of the CMMPI. The model incorporates environmental factors such as weather conditions and air quality that have a greater impact on the growth of Chinese medical plants and the supply of Chinese medicinal materials market. Specifically, we collected multi-source heterogeneous data, including weather data, air quality data, and historical CMMPI data, to construct informative features. Additionally, we proposed a feature selection method based on the genetic algorithm and XGBoost to select features. Finally, we transferred the selected features to the bidirectional GRU deep learning to realize the accurate prediction of the CMMPI trend. We collected 46 CMMPI datasets to test the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model obtained more superior prediction compared to the state-of-the-art methods, and specialized in predicting long-term goal (90 days). Taking the Yunnan and Tibet origin index as examples, the experiment results also show the weather and air quality data can improve the prediction performance, as these factors are known to influence the growth and market supply of Chinese medicinal materials.