Copper and Aluminium as Economically Imperfect Substitutes, Production and Price Development

non-renewable resources and the industry's widespread use of copper
and aluminium for their desired properties. Metal commodities are
irreplaceable for the industry of developed countries, and their
shortage in the covid times also increases the price and consequently
the price of products made from them. As copper ore stocks continue
to decline, suitable substitutes should be sought. The paper discusses
the potential of copper substitution by aluminium and subsequently
the development of prices and production of copper and aluminium,
including a prediction about the future development. Research data
were obtained from Market. business insider (2021) and
Investing.com (2022) converted to time series. The price is shown in
US dollars per tonne and the production value in millions of tonnes.
Development data were processed using artificial intelligence and
recurrent neural networks, including the Long Short Term Memory
layer. Neural networks, as such, have great potential to predict these
types of time series. The annual copper and aluminium production
data were processed using a regression function. Neural networks
could not be used due to the smaller data range. The results show that
the 1NN30L neural network with an LSTM layer and considered a
30-day delay is the most suitable network for forecasting future
copper prices, and the 3NN30L neural network with an LSTM layer
and considered a 30-day delay is the most suitable network for
forecasting future aluminium prices. The forecast has confirmed that
the price of copper will fall at the end of 2021, and the trend will be
constant in the next planned period. Aluminium will also fall sharply
at the end of 2021; at the beginning of 2022, the price level is
predicted to rise to that of 30 October 2021, and thereinafter the trend
will be almost constant. Research has confirmed that copper and
aluminium may be imperfect substitutes in some respect, but they can
generally be considered complementary. Copper mining has
stabilised in recent years, but aluminium production has increased
significantly