Forecasting Carbon Dioxide Price Using a Time-Varying High-Order Moment Hybrid Model of NAGARCHSK and Gated Recurrent Unit Network

The carbon market is recognized as the most effective means for reducing global carbon dioxide emissions. Effective carbon price forecasting can help the carbon market to solve environmental problems at a lower economic cost. However, the existing studies focus on the carbon premium explanation from the perspective of return and volatility spillover under the framework of the mean-variance low-order moment. Specifically, the time-varying, high-order moment shock of market asymmetry and extreme policies on carbon price have been ignored. The innovation of this paper is constructing a new hybrid model, NAGARCHSK-GRU, that is consistent with the special characteristics of the carbon market. In the proposed model, the NAGARCHSK model is designed to extract the time-varying, high-order moment parameter characteristics of carbon price, and the multilayer GRU model is used to train the obtained time-varying parameter and improve the forecasting accuracy. The results conclude that the NAGARCHSK-GRU model has better accuracy and robustness for forecasting carbon price. Moreover, the long-term forecasting performance has been proved. This conclusion proves the rationality of incorporating the time-varying impact of asymmetric information and extreme factors into the forecasting model, and contributes to a powerful reference for investors to formulate investment strategies and assist a reduction in carbon emissions.