Crude oil price forecasting with multivariate selection, machine learning, and a nonlinear combination strategy

Crude oil price forecasting has been one of the research hotspots in the field of energy economics, which plays a crucial role in energy supply and economic development. However, numerous influencing factors bring serious challenges to crude oil price forecasting, and existing research has room for further improvement in terms of an integrated research roadmap that combines impact factor analysis with predictive modelling. This study aims to examine the impact of financial market factors on the crude oil market and to propose a nonlinear combined forecasting framework based on common variables. Four types of daily exogenous financial market variables are introduced: commodity prices, exchange rates, stock market indices, and macroeconomic indicators for ten indicators. First, various variable selection methods generate different variable subsets, providing more diversity and reliability. Next, common variables in the subset of variables are selected as key features for subsequent models. Then, four models predict crude oil prices using common features as inputs and obtain the prediction results for each model. Finally, the nonlinear mechanism of the deep learning technology is introduced to combine above single prediction results. Experimental results reveal that commodity and foreign exchange factors in financial markets are critical determinants of crude oil market volatility over the long term, as observed in experiments conducted on the West Texas Intermediate and Brent oil price datasets. The proposed model demonstrates strong performance regarding average absolute percentage error, recorded at 2.9962% and 2.4314%, respectively, indicating high forecasting accuracy and robustness. This forecasting framework offers an effective methodology for predicting crude oil prices and enhances understanding the crude oil market.