The role of online news sentiment in carbon price prediction of China’s carbon markets

Carbon trading as a vital tool to reduce carbon dioxide emissions has developed rapidly in recent years. Reasonable prediction of the carbon price can improve the risk management in the carbon trading market and make healthy development of the carbon trading market. This paper aims to enhance the predictive performance of carbon price in the China’s carbon markets, especially the China’s national carbon market, by adding the online news sentiment index which is a kind of unconstructed data, to a deep learning model using traditionally constructed predictors innovatively. Long short–term memory (LSTM) network was applied as the primary model to predict carbon price and random forest as the additional experiment to validate the effectiveness of online news sentiment. The results in the China’s national carbon market and Hubei pilot carbon market both proved that the model including the sentiment index performed better than the model does not, and the improvement was significant.