  With recent advances in the field of machine learning, the use of deep neural
networks for time series forecasting has become more prevalent. The
quasi-periodic nature of the solar cycle makes it a good candidate for applying
time series forecasting methods. We employ a combination of WaveNet and LSTM
neural networks to forecast the sunspot number using the years 1749 to 2019 and
total sunspot area using the years 1874 to 2019 time series data for the
upcoming Solar Cycle 25. Three other models involving the use of LSTMs and 1D
ConvNets are also compared with our best model. Our analysis shows that the
WaveNet and LSTM model is able to better capture the overall trend and learn
the inherent long and short term dependencies in time series data. Using this
method we forecast 11 years of monthly averaged data for Solar Cycle 25. Our
forecasts show that the upcoming Solar Cycle 25 will have a maximum sunspot
number around 106 $\pm$ 19.75 and maximum total sunspot area around 1771 $\pm$
381.17. This indicates that the cycle would be slightly weaker than Solar Cycle
24.
