Bionic-inspired oil price prediction: Auditory multi-feature collaboration network

Predictions of the oil price are critical to support intelligent decision-making for individual investors, governments, and corporations, but a challenging task since there are complex nonlinear and random fluctuations involved in series. Additionally, most existing methods mainly focus on the data-layer fitting, and inherit uninterpretable design flowcharts and unclear layer functions. Based on the fact that living things evolve numerous advanced cognition processes after long-term interactions with environments, it is a promising problem to design bionic deep prediction networks. In this paper, an auditory-inspired multi-feature collaboration network (AMFC-Net) is explored to predict the oil price, and includes the feature extraction, brain memory, and comprehensive prediction blocks. Specifically, through imitating that complex sounds are captured by auditory canals and converted into electrical impulses, the first block adopts four typical activation functions to extract multi-group complementary features for detecting nonlinear changes. Through imitating that electrical impulses are transformed to the left and right hemispheres for handling and analyzing, the second block realizes gating and cooperation mechanisms to learn long short-term dependencies and highlight core information. Through imitating that information is sent to higher cerebral cortices for sensing the environment, the third block maps relationships from features to targets for producing final predictions. In summary, multi-channel convolution operations establish the imitations of both form (clear functional layer) and spirit (layer-by-layer collaboration), which not only ensure the prediction effectiveness but also improve the AMFC-Net interpretability. Three experiments (comparison with 12 machine learning methods), three experiments (comparison with 8 hybrid methods under decomposition plus ensemble framework), and seven discussions under two real-world oil price datasets all indicate that the proposed AMFC-Net is superior and suitable to predict the oil price.