Two forecasting model selection methods based on time series image feature augmentation

Forecasting and early warning of agricultural product prices is a crucial task in stream data event analysis and agricultural data mining. Existing methods for forecasting agricultural product prices suffer from inefficient feature engineering and challenges in handling imbalanced sample data. To address these issues, we propose a novel predictive model selection approach based on time series image encoding. Specifically, we utilize Gramian Angular Fields (GAF), Markov Transition Fields (MTF), and Recurrence Plots (RP) to transform time series data into image representations. We then introduce an Information Fusion Feature Augmentation (IFFA) method to effectively combine these time series images, ensuring that all relevant event information is preserved. The combined time series images (TSCI) are subsequently fed into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier for model selection. Furthermore, to accommodate the unique characteristics of the data, we incorporate Transfer Learning (TL) and S-Folder Cross Validation (S-FCV) to optimize the model selection process, thereby mitigating overfitting due to limited or imbalanced data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed IFFA-TSCI-CNN-SFCV method outperforms existing approaches in terms of both efficiency and accuracy.