Comparative Analysis for Forecasting Apple Prices in the Indian Market Using the SARIMA, ETS, and LSTM Model

Fruits are an integral part of our diet. Various types of proteins and vitamins are obtained through fruits. Apple is a major fruit that is consumed globally. This is a multipurpose fruit that is used in the preparation of various food products and also in medicines. Therefore, it is important to analyze its future prices. India is the largest producer of apples, thus it is very important to analyze the Apple prices of Indian agricultural markets. Machine learning and deep learning models have not been previously applied to this Indian dataset. Various time series models like Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), SARIMA, and ETS are developed, but the performance of LSTM is much better compared to the other models, with the lowest error rates (MAE of 554.08, RMSE of 752.10, 191, and MAPE of 6.63 percent). Thus, the proposed study provides the solution to a real-life problem, which ultimately can be used for agriculture policy making and smart market strategies.