Accurate prediction of shipping freight indices, represented by the Baltic Dry Index (BDI), is crucial for operational decision-making and risk management in the shipping industry. Existing models mainly rely on historical time-series data and often overlook the influence of unstructured information such as market sentiment. To address this limitation, this study proposes a dynamic freight rate prediction framework integrating a shipping text sentiment index. First, a shipping news sentiment index is constructed using a RoBERTa-based pre-trained model to quantify the impact of market sentiment on freight rate fluctuations. Second, the BDI series is decomposed and reconstructed through Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) and Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering to extract multiscale features. Finally, a deep learning based multi-step prediction model is developed by incorporating the sentiment index into the forecasting process. Empirical results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms benchmark models without sentiment information in terms of MAE, RMSE, and R2, and demonstrates greater robustness under extreme market conditions. These findings provide a novel methodological framework for improving freight rate forecasting accuracy and offer practical decision support for shipping enterprises.
Qu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.