Forecasting Daily Crude Oil Prices Using Improved CEEMDAN and Ridge Regression-Based Predictors

As one of the leading types of energy, crude oil plays a crucial role in the global economy. Understanding the movement of crude oil prices is very attractive for producers, consumers and even researchers. However, due to its complex features of nonlinearity and nonstationarity, it is a very challenging task to accurately forecasting crude oil prices. Inspired by the well-known framework “decomposition and ensemble” in signal processing and/or time series forecasting, we propose a new approach that integrates the improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN), differential evolution (DE) and several types of ridge regression (RR), namely, ICEEMDAN-DE-RR, for more accurate crude oil price forecasting in this paper. The proposed approach consists of three steps. First, we use the ICEEMDAN to decompose the complex daily crude oil price series into several relatively simple components. Second, ridge regression or kernel ridge regression is employed to forecast each decomposed component. To enhance the accuracy of ridge regression, DE is used to jointly optimize the regularization item, the weights and parameters of each single kernel for each component. Finally, the predicted results of all components are aggregated as the final predicted results. The publicly available West Texas Intermediate (WTI) daily crude oil spot prices are used to validate the performance of the proposed approach. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can achieve better performance than some state-of-the-art approaches in terms of several evaluation criteria, demonstrating that the proposed ICEEMDAN-DE-RR is very promising for daily crude oil price forecasting.