TCN-QV: an attention-based deep learning method for long sequence time-series forecasting of gold prices

Accurate prediction of gold prices is crucial for investment decision-making and national risk management. The time series data of gold prices exhibits random fluctuations, non-linear characteristics, and high volatility, making prediction extremely challenging. Various methods, from classical statistics to machine learning techniques like Random Forests, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), have achieved high accuracy, but they also have inherent limitations. To address these issues, a model that combines Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) with Query (Q) and Keys (K) attention mechanisms (TCN-QV) is proposed to enhance the accuracy of gold price predictions. The model begins by employing stacked dilated causal convolution layers within the TCN framework to effectively extract temporal features from the sequence data. Subsequently, an attention mechanism is introduced to enable adaptive weight distribution according to the information features. Finally, the predicted results are generated through a dense layer. This method is used to predict the time series data of gold prices in Shanghai. The optimized model demonstrates a substantial improvement in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) compared to the baseline model, achieving reductions of approximately 5.47% in the least favorable case and up to 33.69% in the most favorable scenario across four experimental datasets. Additionally, the model is tested across different time steps and shows satisfactory performance in long sequence predictions. To validate the necessity of the model components, this paper conducts ablation experiments to confirm the significance of each segment.