Impact of Metal Commodity Prices in Predicting the Future Rate of Inflation rate in Poland

The prices of metal commodities have long been influenced, especially by the lack of non-renewable resources and the widespread use of copper and aluminum in industry due to their properties. Metal commodities are irreplaceable for the sector of developed countries, and their scarcity during the COVID-19 period increases both their price and, subsequently, the price of products made of these metals. The paper deals with the trend of selected metal commodity prices on the global market in the context of the macroeconomic indicator trend of Poland's inflation rate. The paper aims to predict the inflation rate trend in Poland and determine which of the selected metal commodities is most closely linked to the economy. The research data were obtained from Investing.com (2024) and Eurostat (2024) and converted to time series. The price of metal commodities is given in US dollars per tonne, while the inflation rate is expressed as a percentage. The data on the development were processed using artificial intelligence and recurrent neural networks, including the Long Short Term Memory layer. In general, neural networks have great potential to predict this type of time series. The experiment involved prediction models built on artificial neural networks (NN) with the LSTM layer and 19-day lag. The research confirmed that the development of copper, zinc, and aluminum prices is closely interlinked with the Polish economy. Therefore, the inflation rate in Poland can be predicted with a high probability based on the development of the examined metal commodities prices.