An Improved Nonequidistant Grey Model Based on Simpson Formula and Its Application

Grey prediction models have been widely used in various fields of society due to their high prediction accuracy; accordingly, there exists a vast majority of grey models for equidistant sequences; however, limited research is focusing on nonequidistant sequence. The development of nonequidistant grey prediction models is very slow due to their complex modeling mechanism. In order to further expand the grey system theory, a new nonequidistant grey prediction model is established in this paper. To further improve the prediction accuracy of the NEGM (1, 1, t2) model, the background values of the improved nonequidistant grey model are optimized based on Simpson formula, which is abbreviated as INEGM (1, 1, t2). Meanwhile, to verify the validity of the proposed model, this model is applied in two real-world cases in comparison with three other benchmark models, and the modeling results are evaluated through several commonly used indicators. The results of two cases show that the INEGM (1, 1, t2) model has the best prediction performance among these competitive models.