Use of artificial neural networks for prognosis of charcoal prices in Minas Gerais

Energy is an important factor of economic growth and is critical to the stability of a nation. Charcoal is a renewable energy resource and is a fundamental input to the development of the Brazilian forest-based industry. The objective of this study is to provide a prognosis of the charcoal price series for the year 2007 by using Artificial Neural Networks. A feedforward multilayer perceptron ANN was used, the results of which are close to reality. The main findings are that: real prices of charcoal dropped between 1975 and 2000 and rose from the early 21st century; the ANN with two hidden layers was the architecture making the best prediction; the most effective learning rate was 0.99 and 600 cycles, representing the most satisfactory and accurate ANN training. Prediction using ANN was found to be more accurate when compared by the mean squared error to other studies modeling charcoal price series in Minas Gerais state.