ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Forecasting China’s Steam Coal Prices Using Dynamic Factors and Mixed-Frequency Data
,
 
 
 
More details
Hide details
1
School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology, China
 
2
School of Economics and Management, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China
 
 
Submission date: 2020-10-12
 
 
Final revision date: 2020-12-18
 
 
Acceptance date: 2020-12-21
 
 
Online publication date: 2021-06-01
 
 
Publication date: 2021-07-29
 
 
Corresponding author
Wanglin Kang   

School of Economics and Management, Shandong University of Science and Technology, China
 
 
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2021;30(5):4241-4254
 
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the dynamic relationship between steam coal price and its drivers sampling mixed frequencies to improve the prediction of weekly steam coal price. A novel hybrid method, combining the mixed data sampling (MIDAS) model with eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm, is proposed to perform forecast of weekly steam coal prices by applying the latest mixed factors with high frequencies. The empirical evidences indicate that the daily natural gas prices, temperatures, and air quality index (AQI) have better predictive abilities for steam coal prices than the A-share index and crude oil prices. It’s shown that the hybrid model has approximately 23.27% and 78.39% accuracy improvement over the combination-MIDAS and other benchmark models, respectively. The empirical results are helpful for the government to effectively capture the fluctuation and uncertainty of steam coal prices from the energy market and environmental conditions to make reasonable strategies in China.
eISSN:2083-5906
ISSN:1230-1485
Journals System - logo
Scroll to top