Welcome to the time series forecasting competition from the AI for Good course. For more context and materials from the course, check out the GitHub repo here.

In this competition, we give you monthly grain commodity prices such as wheat, maize, rice, and barley from markets across the world going as far back as the 1990s. The wheat prices come from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and the other grain prices come from the International Grains Council (IGC).

In February of 2022, Russian invaded the Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russio-Ukrainian war (Wikipedia). The invasion, the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, has caused hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties. The ripples of the conflict reverberated around the world, including major disruptions to global grain markets.

For this competition, imagine you are an analyst for the FAO in March 2022, right after the start of the invasion, tasked with forecasting how this conflict will impact grain prices in markets around the world for the next 3 months.

Goal: Use the historical data on grain prices in markets around the world up through March 2022 to forecast the price of wheat in USD in each market for the months of April, May, and June of 2022.