China's Economic Growth from a Comprehensive Analysis Perspective: A Synergistic Application of GRA, PCA, and GRU Models
Abstract
In the context of globalization and economic integration, accurately predicting China's quarterly GDP growth rate is crucial for macroeconomic decision-making. This paper proposes a comprehensive forecasting framework that combines Grey Relational Analysis (GRA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-based neural network model to improve prediction accuracy. The study first identifies economic indicators highly correlated with GDP growth through GRA. It then extracts key variability from multidimensional data using PCA, constructing a "China Macroeconomic Vitality Index." Simultaneously, a GRU model, combined with error correction and Bayesian optimization techniques, significantly enhances prediction accuracy. The results demonstrate that the optimized GRU model exhibits significant reductions in evaluation metrics such as SMAPE, MAE, and MSE, indicating good forecasting performance. Additionally, SHAP value analysis reveals the specific impact of each economic indicator on GDP growth, providing a basis for macroeconomic decisions.
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