Organizations: Quotr, Floz Inc., Castro Valley, CA 94546, USA. · Baruch College, New York, NY 10010, USA. · University of California, Berkeley, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 760 Davis Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. · Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
The persistent volatility of construction material prices poses significant risks to cost estimation, budgeting, and project delivery, underscoring the urgent need for granular and scalable forecasting methods. This study develops a forecasting framework that leverages the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) MasterFormat as the target data structure, enabling predictions at the six-digit Section level and supporting detailed cost projections across a wide spectrum of building materials. To enhance predictive accuracy, the framework integrates explanatory variables such as raw material prices, commodity indexes, and macroeconomic indicators. Five time-series models, long short-term memory (LSTM), autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), vector error correction model (VECM), vanilla Transformer, and Chronos-Bolt, were evaluated under both baseline configurations (using CSI data only) and extended versions with explanatory variables. Results demonstrate that incorporating explanatory variables significantly improves predictive performance across all models. Among the tested approaches, the LSTM model consistently achieved the highest accuracy, with root mean squared error (RMSE) values as low as 4.19 and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values of 1.60 based on Division 06 as a representative demonstration, representing improvements of up to 59% over the traditional statistical time-series model, ARIMA. Validation across multiple CSI Divisions within the residential-material confirmed the framework's scalability, while Division 06 (Wood, Plastics, and Composites) is presented in detail as a demonstration case. This research offers a robust methodology that enables owners and contractors to improve budgeting practices and achieve more reliable cost estimation at the definitive level.
Time series forecasting predicts future values from ordered observations using statistical, neural, and probabilistic models to support decisions under uncertainty.
This study develops a digitalized forecasting-inventory optimization pipeline integrating traditional forecasting models, machine learning regressors, and deep sequence models within a unified inventory simulation framework. Using the M5 Walmart dataset, we evaluate seven forecasting approaches and assess their operational impact under single- and two-echelon newsvendor systems. Results indicate that Temporal CNN and LSTM models significantly reduce inventory costs and improve fill rates compared to statistical baselines. Sensitivity and multi-echelon analyses demonstrate robustness and scalability, offering a data-driven decision-support tool for modern supply chains.
Swata Marik, Swayamjit Saha, Garga Chatterjee
Department of Home Science, University of Calcutta, 20 E, Judges Court Road, Alipore, Kolkata, 700027, West Bengal, India. · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mississippi State University, 665 George Perry Street, Starkville, 39759, MS, USA. · Psychology Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, 203, B.T. Road, Kolkata, 700108, West Bengal, India.
Forecasting agricultural commodity prices in emerging economies is difficult due to high volatility, frequent supply disruptions, and strong cultural influences on demand. This study introduces the Kalimati Vegetable Price Index (KVPI), a new inverse-volatility weighted composite index that aggregates 135 daily wholesale commodities from Kathmandu over ten years (2013-2023). By creating a stable macro-level signal, the KVPI reduces the noise inherent in modelling individual crops. A rich set of 64 causally valid features was developed, including festival lead-lag effects, rolling statistics, and calendar variables. Fourteen forecasting models spanning statistical, tree-based, deep learning, hybrid, and transformer architectures were rigorously evaluated across short (7-day), medium (14- and 30-day), and long-term (90-day) horizons. Tree-based ensembles proved notably robust, while classical statistical models and complex transformers struggled with the noisy dataset. The proposed Momentum-Corrected Online Stacking Ensemble achieved the strongest performance, yielding a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 1.771, an exceptionally low Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 0.68%, and explaining 84.5% of the variance (R-squared = 0.845) at the 90-day horizon. This open-source pipeline provides policymakers and supply chain actors in Nepal and similar markets with a practical, reliable tool for anticipating price movements and strengthening food security.
Sahaj Raj Malla
Department of Mathematics, Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel, Nepal
Reliable real estate price indicators are typically published at city level and low frequency, limiting their use for neighborhood-scale monitoring and long-horizon planning. We study whether sub-city price indices can be forecasted at weekly frequency by combining physical development signals from satellite radar with market narratives from news text. Using over 350,000 transactions from Dubai Land Department (2015-2025), we construct weekly price indices for 19 sub-city regions and evaluate forecasts from 2 to 34 weeks ahead. Our framework fuses regional transaction history with Sentinel-1 SAR backscatter, news sentiment combining lexical tone and semantic embeddings, and macroeconomic context. Results are strongly horizon dependent: at horizons up to 10 weeks, price history alone matches multimodal configurations, but beyond 14 weeks sentiment and SAR become critical. At long horizons (26-34 weeks), the full multimodal model reduces mean absolute error from 4.48 to 2.93 (35% reduction), with gains statistically significant across regions. Nonparametric learners consistently outperform deep architectures in this data regime. These findings establish benchmarks for weekly sub-city index forecasting and demonstrate that remote sensing and news sentiment materially improve predictability at strategically relevant horizons.