An improved EEMD-based hybrid approach for the short-term forecasting of hog price in China

Short-term forecasting of hog price, which forms the basis for the decision making, is challenging and of great interest for hog producers and market participants. This study develops improved ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD)-based hybrid approach for the short-term hog price forecasting. Specifically, the EEMD is first used to decompose the original hog price series into several intrinsic-mode functions (IMF) and one residue. The fine-to-coarse reconstruction algorithm is then applied to compose the obtained IMFs and residue into the high-frequency fluctuation, the low-frequency fluctuation, and the trend terms which can highlight new features of the hog price fluctuations. Afterwards, the extreme learning machine (ELM) is employed to model the low-frequency fluctuation, while the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and the polynomial function are used to fit the high-frequency fluctuation and trend term, respectively, in a multistep-ahead fashion. The commonly used iterated prediction strategy is adopted for the implementation of the multistep-ahead forecasting. The monthly hog price series from January 2000 to May 2015 in China is employed to evaluate the forecasting performance of the proposed approach with the selected counterparts. The numerical results indicate that the improved EEMD-based hybrid approach is a promising alternative for the short-term hog price forecasting.