A hybrid coal prediction model based on grey Markov optimized by GWO - A case study of Hebei province in China

Accurate prediction of coal consumption is crucial to the structural adjustment and high-quality development of the coal industry, and provides an effective basis for the government to formulate energy strategies. To enhance the prediction accuracy, a hybrid prediction model combining grey wolf optimization algorithm and grey Markov model (GWO_Markov_DNGM) is proposed in this study, which introduces the idea of Markov interval division in order to make up the defect of obtaining interval by experience in the past. In this research, coal consumption in Hebei Province from 2001 to 2020 is used as an example to verify the accuracy of the model and the results show that the proposed model has higher accuracy than the comparison models, including ARIMA, GM (1, 1), DGM (1, 1), DNGM (1, 1) and the grey Markov model with equidistant division of state interval. In addition, this study also discusses the influence of numbers of state intervals on the prediction accuracy of the proposed model, which further illustrates the high prediction accuracy of the proposed hybrid model. Finally, the proposed model is employed to predict the coal consumption of Hebei Province under three scenarios from 2021 to 2025, and several suggestions are put forward.