Crude Oil Prices Forecasting: Time Series vs. SVR Models

This research explores the weekly crude oil price data from U.S. Energy Information Administration over the time period 2009 - 2017 to test the forecasting accuracy by comparing time series models such as simple exponential smoothing (SES), moving average (MA), and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) against machine learning support vector regression (SVR) models. The main purpose of this research is to determine which model provides the best forecasting results for crude oil prices in light of the importance of crude oil price forecasting and its implications to the economy. While SVR is often considered the best forecasting model in the main stream literature, this research investigates its computational insights in terms of parameter selections and overfitting potential, in addition to exploring forecasting accuracy and model comparison. The results of this research can be generalized to forecast other business and economic time series data such as stock market prices, product sales, and government statistics

Uncertainty shocks of Trump election in an interval model of stock market

This paper proposes a new class of nonlinear interval models for interval-valued time series. By matching the interval model with interval observations, we develop a nonlinear minimum-distance estimation method for the proposed models, and establish the asymptotic theory for the proposed estimators. Superior to traditional point-based methods, the proposed interval modelling approach can assess the change in both the trend and volatility simultaneously. Within the proposed interval framework, this paper examines the impact of the 2016 US presidential election (henceforth Trump election) on the US stock market as a case study. Considering the validity of daily high-low range as a proxy of market efficiency, we employ an interval-valued return to jointly measure the fundamental value movement and market efficiency simultaneously. Empirical results suggest a strong evidence that the Trump election has increased the level/trend and lowered the volatility of the S&P 500 index in both ex ante and ex post analysis. Furthermore, a longer half-life period for the impact on fundamental value (62.4 days) than high-low range (15.9 days) has shown that the impact of Trump's victory on fundamental value is more persistent than its impact on market efficiency

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