This paper establishes a short-term prediction model of weekly retail prices for eggs based on chaotic neural network with the weekly retail prices of eggs from January 2008 to December 2012 in China. In the process of determining the structure of the chaotic neural network, the number of input layer nodes of the network is calculated by reconstructing phase space and computing its saturated embedding dimension, and then the number of hidden layer nodes is estimated by trial and error. Finally, this model is applied to predict the retail prices of eggs and compared with ARIMA. The result shows that the chaotic neural network has better nonlinear fitting ability and higher precision in the prediction of weekly retail price of eggs. The empirical result also shows that the chaotic neural network can be widely used in the field of short-term prediction of agricultural prices.

The paper studies the relationship, adjustment ability, path, efficiency and intensity of price transmission in the swine industry chain in China, which consists of the prices of corn, compound feed for fattening pig, piglet, pig and pork. Monthly prices covering a period of 18 yr (1994-2011) are analyzed using a Market-Chain Cooperated Model (MCM). The empirical results show that there exists a stable long-term cointegration and short-term dynamic relationship in the price system. First, the adjustment speed of each price series is very slow and the transmission path is top-down and one-way significantly. Second, the price from upstream to downstream lags about 2 mon, while there is no lag in price transmission from midstream to downstream. Third, in terms of price transmission intensity, the price of pig impacted greatly on pork price, not only in the current period but also through the whole period. Besides, the price of corn has the largest lagged effects on pork price. According to the above empirical results, we suggest that government should strengthen monitoring and early warning of the swine industry chain, especially the upstream and midstream, attach great importance to the timely adjustment of feed prices and perfect the measures of price subsidy.