THE COMPARISON OF LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORY AND BIDIRECTIONAL LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORY FOR FORECASTING COAL PRICE

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Coal remains vital for global energy despite recent demand fluctuations due to the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projected a decline in global coal demand starting in early 2024, driven by increasing renewable energy adoption. As one of the top coal exporters, Indonesia must adjust to these changes. This study aims to forecast future coal prices using historical data from Indonesia's Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (KESDM), applying and comparing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) models. While BiLSTM has shown advantages in other contexts and studies, its effectiveness for coal price forecasting remains underexplored. To ensure robust predictions, we employ walk-forward validation, which divides the data into six segments and evaluates 90 hyperparameter combinations across all segments. The BiLSTM model consistently outperforms the LSTM model, achieving lower average RMSE and MAPE values. Specifically, BiLSTM records an average MAPE of 7.847 and RMSE of 10.485, compared to LSTM's 10.442 and 11.993, respectively. The Diebold-Mariano (DM) test using squared error and absolute error loss functions further corroborates these findings, with most segments showing significant improvements in favor of BiLSTM, indicated by negative DM-test statistics and p-values below 0.01 or 0.10. This superior performance continues into the testing data, where BiLSTM maintains lower error metrics and a significant result of the DM test, underscoring its reliability for forecasting. In the final stage, the forecasts from both models indicate a nearly linear downward trend in coal prices over the next 18 months, aligning with the International Energy Agency's 2023 projection of a structural decline in coal demand driven by the sustained growth of clean energy technologies.