A novel paradigm: Addressing real-time decomposition challenges in carbon price prediction

Carbon price prediction serves as a market indicator and economic driver, facilitating the adoption of more environmentally friendly production methods to achieve the emission reduction targets outlined in the Paris Agreement. In recent years, time series analysis and decomposition techniques have been widely applied to carbon price forecasting. However, few researchers have considered the issue of data feature drift caused by real-time decomposition. Specifically, as the sample size increases, data features undergo changes, rendering the trained models unable to fit the new data. This paper explains the underlying reasons for this phenomenon from new perspectives and proposes a novel paradigm that replaces the intrinsic mode function with a single-step fuzzy particle. This new paradigm corrects the issue of data feature drift and concentrates noise into a completely new sequence during the preprocessing stage. In the subsequent processing steps, the loss of correlation between the sequence and time lag, as well as the sequence and carbon prices, is addressed through multi-information association. This paradigm hybrid model can be applied to deterministic and interval multi-step predictions. Experimental results on the datasets from Guangdong and Hubei demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other comparative models, achieving better predictive results than existing decomposition-based forecasting models. In the case of Guangdong, the normalized root mean square error (NRMSE%) for one-step, three-step, and five-step deterministic predictions are 2.18%, 2.51%, and 2.89%, respectively. The average interval score (AIS) for interval predictions are −0.357 and − 0.2375, respectively.