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The volatile characteristics of the tanker market pose challenges to forecasting. In addition, the volatile characteristics of newbuilding and secondhand ship prices, time charter rates, and scrap values make developing a unified framework of forecasting difficult. Most researchers have developed forecasting models and evaluated their performance based on a specific market. Such narrow development imposes difficulty for practitioners to choose a suitable model. Due to the boom of machine learning, many researchers are trying to boost the forecasting accuracy of shipping markets using machine learning. However, there are many hyper-parameters of the complex machine learning models and a slight variation of the model may cause significant performance degradation. This paper utilizes a forecast combination mechanism to forecast many time series collected from the shipping market, including newbuilding and secondhand ship prices, scrap values, and time charter rates. The models inside the combination pool are just linear functions. Finally, we compare their performance with conventional machine learning models and naïve forecasts using three error metrics and statistical tests. The statistical tests show that the combination of linear models is superior. The findings of this study also indicate that complex models do not boost forecasting accuracy necessarily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient forecasting of ship order books holds immense significance in the maritime industry, enabling companies to optimize their operations, allocate resources effectively, and make informed decisions. However, volatile characteristics within historical order books pose challenges in achieving reliable, intelligent, and precise forecasts. This paper presents a novel ensemble deep random vector functional link (edRVFL) algorithm to anticipate future ship order book dynamics. The edRVFL leverages deep feature extraction and ensemble learning to enhance forecasting performance. To further elevate its capabilities, we introduce a discontinuous and parsimonious embedding strategy, which deviates from the conventional dense collection of continuous time steps used in vanilla edRVFL. This parsimonious embedding approach limits the model's complexity and boosts its generalization ability. We extensively evaluate the proposed method using ship order book data, and comparative studies demonstrate its superiority over alternative approaches. Our proposed edRVFL offers a promising solution for accurate and efficient ship order book forecasting, making it a valuable asset in the maritime industry's decision-making processes. The source codes utilized in this research are openly available on GitHub at the following link: https://github.com/crkkkaa/Ship-order-book-forecasting-by-an-ensemble-deep-parsimonious-random-vector-functional-link-network-. • A novel ensemble deep RVFL to anticipate ship order book dynamics is proposed. • We propose a parsimonious embedding algorithm to optimize temporal patterns. • The direct links ablation study is conducted for comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asset prices play a significant role in the financial survival and profitability of ship-owning firms. In a highly volatile shipping market, prices of newbuilding ships must be predicted to detect security shortfalls as well as opportunities for temporal arbitration (gaining on high–low pricing). Accordingly, this paper proposes an improved version of the intelligent model search engine (IMSE) by asynchronous time lag selection. The parsimonious IMSE algorithm comprises the essential components such as input and training data size selection by a grid search procedure. In the initial IMSE algorithm, time-lag (memory size) selection is designed such that a serial cluster of memory groups is assigned synchronously for all inputs. By relaxing of lag structures selection, the proposed algorithm estimates unique lead–lag relations for the input of the intended problem set. An extensive benchmark study with several baseline models and the persistence forecast (Naïve I) is performed to observe the out-of-sample accuracy of the proposed approach. The empirical results indicate that second-hand ship prices, scrap values, and orderbook (no. of orders) have predictive features and are selected by the search engine for two ship sizes. Different lag structures are estimated for each input with asynchronous time-lag selection improvement. • A novel intelligent model search engine algorithm is proposed for newbuilding ship prices. • The proposed algorithm ensures the parsimony of the lag structure. • The selected lags and explanatory variables are highly interpretable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]