ALBERT

Description: Crude oil is one of the main energy sources and its prices have gained increasing attention due to its important role in the world economy. Accurate prediction of crude oil prices is an important issue not only for ordinary investors, but also for the whole society. To achieve the accurate prediction of nonstationary and nonlinear crude oil price time series, an adaptive hybrid ensemble learning paradigm integrating complementary ensemble empirical mode decomposition (CEEMD), autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and sparse Bayesian learning (SBL), namely CEEMD-ARIMA&SBL-SBL (CEEMD-A&S-SBL), is developed in this study. Firstly, the decomposition method CEEMD, which can reduce the end effects and mode mixing, was employed to decompose the original crude oil price time series into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and one residue. Then, ARIMA and SBL with combined kernels were applied to predict target values for the residue and each single IMF independently. Finally, the predicted values of the above two models for each component were adaptively selected based on the training precision, and then aggregated as the final forecasting results using SBL without kernel-tricks. Experiments were conducted on the crude oil spot prices of the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent crude oil to evaluate the performance of the proposed CEEMD-A&S-SBL. The experimental results demonstrated that, compared with some state-of-the-art prediction models, CEEMD-A&S-SBL can significantly improve the prediction accuracy of crude oil prices in terms of the root mean squared error (RMSE), the mean absolute percent error (MAPE), and the directional statistic (Dstat).