Abstract
Effective carbon pricing policies have become an effective tool for many countries to encourage emission reduction. An accurate carbon price prediction model is helpful for the implementation of energy conservation and emission reduction policies and the decision-making of governments and investors. However, it is difficult for a single prediction model to achieve high prediction accuracy because of the high complexity of the carbon price series. Many studies have proved the nonlinear characteristics of carbon trading prices, but there are very few studies on the chaotic nature of carbon price series. As a consequence, this paper proposes an innovative hybrid model for carbon price prediction. A decomposition-reconstruction-prediction-integration scheme is designed to predict carbon prices. Firstly, several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and one residue were obtained from the raw data decomposed by ICEEMDAN. Next, the decomposed subsection is reconstructed into a new sequence according to the calculation results by the Lempel-Ziv complexity algorithm. Then, considering the chaotic characteristics of sequence, the input variables of the models are determined through the phase space reconstruction (PSR) algorithm combined with the partial autocorrelation function (PACF). Finally, the Sparrow search algorithm (SSA) is introduced to optimize the extreme learning machine (ELM) model, which is applied in the carbon price prediction for the purpose of verifying the validity of the proposed combination model, which is applied to the pilots of Hubei, Beijing, and Guangdong. The empirical results show that the combination model outperformed the 13 other models in predicting accuracy, speed, and stability. The decomposition-reconstruction-prediction-integration strategy is a method for predicting the carbon price efficiently.