Hybrid TCN-transformer model for predicting sustainable food supply and ensuring resilience

Major concerns occur in maintaining a sustainable food supply due to population expansion, supply chain interruptions, and climate-related changes. Traditional forecasting models, such as ARIMA, LSTM, and GRU, fail to deal with the dynamic fluctuations and long-range correlations. These methods often have reduced accuracy, high computational cost, and poor generalization when applied to shifting patterns in the food supply system. Based on the abovementioned limitations, this study proposes a Hybrid TCN-Transformer Model by combining the strength of Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) with Transformer Attention to provide accurate and efficient food supply prediction. Thus, the project's key objective is to develop a deep learning system that effectively handles massive quantities of temporal data while preserving dependence in short and long durations. The proposed method is novel since it integrates TCN's causal convolutions for extracting sequential patterns. It uses a Transformer Model's self-attention mechanism to capture the complex interactions across time steps. Hybrid design enables faster training, increased interpretability, and better prediction accuracy than current methods. Results from experiments have revealed that the suggested model surpasses the performance of the stand-alone TCN, ARIMA, LSTM, and GRU models in terms of accuracy of predictions, efficiency of computations, and adaptability. Findings thus far suggest deep learning-based predictive analytics has helped improve the food supply chain management by mitigating food wastage, making it environmentally resilient.