Interval Forecasting of Carbon Futures Prices Using a Novel Hybrid Approach with Exogenous Variables

This paper examines the interval forecasting of carbon futures prices in one of the most important carbon futures market. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to present a novel hybrid approach, which is composed of multioutput support vector regression (MSVR) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), in the task of forecasting the highest and lowest prices of carbon futures on the next trading day. Furthermore, we set out to investigate if considering some potential predictors, which have strong influence on carbon futures prices, in modeling process is useful for achieving better prediction performance. Aiming at testing its effectiveness, we benchmark the forecasting performance of our approach against four competitors. The daily interval prices of carbon futures contracts traded in the Intercontinental Futures Exchange from August 12, 2010, to November 13, 2014, are used as the experiment dataset. The statistical significance of the interval forecasts is examined. The proposed hybrid approach is found to demonstrate the higher forecasting performance relative to all other competitors. Our application offers practitioners a promising set of results with interval forecasting in carbon futures market.