Analyzing the behavior dynamics of grain price indexes using Tucker tensor decomposition and spatio-temporal trajectories

Abstract

Agribusiness is an activity that generates huge amounts of temporal data. There are research centers that collect, store and create indexes of agricultural activities, providing multidimensional time series composed by years of data. In this paper, we are interested in studying the behavior of these time series, especially in what regards the evolution of agricultural price indexes over the years. We explore data mining techniques tailored to analyze temporal data, aiming to generate spatio-temporal trajectories of grains price indexes for six years of data. We propose the use of Tucker decomposition to both analyze the temporal patterns of these price indexes and map trajectories that represent their behavior over time in a concise and representative low-dimensional subspace. The case study presents an application of this methodology to real databases of price indexes of corn and soybeans in Brazil and the United States.