A robust time-varying weight combined model for crude oil price forecasting

Crude oil plays a vital role in industrial and social development and has become an integral part of the economic development. However, influenced by policies, wars, etc., it is hard to capture the trend of complex and volatile crude oil price if only one model is used, which often leads to poor forecasts. To enhance the prediction accuracy and robustness of forecasting models, a novel combined forecasting method with time-varying weights, i.e., Jaynes weight hybrid (JWH) model incorporating the Shannon information entropy and several forecasting methods is proposed in this paper. In the selection of the baseline models, the autoregressive integrated moving average in classical statistical forecasting strategies, back propagation neural network, extreme learning machine in neural network and long short-term memory neural network in deep learning models are chosen to fit the crude oil price. Four datasets and three experiments are constructed to verify the prediction ability of the novel combined forecasting model. Empirical results are calculated by five measurement criteria, suggesting that the prediction accuracy of the novel combined method is significantly higher than several comparison models and the mean absolute percentage error of the model has arrived 2.81 % in detail. Particularly, the proposed model has achieved satisfactory performances in Covid-19 and the War in Ukraine, further verifying the robustness of the combined methodology.