A Multistep Chaotic Model for Municipal Solid Waste Generation Prediction

In this study, a univariate local chaotic model is proposed to make one-step and multistep forecasts for daily municipal solid waste (MSW) generation in Seattle, Washington. For MSW generation prediction with long history data, this forecasting model was created based on a nonlinear dynamic method called phase-space reconstruction. Compared with other nonlinear predictive models, such as artificial neural network (ANN) and partial least square-support vector machine (PLS-SVM), and a commonly used linear seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (sARIMA) model, this method has demonstrated better prediction accuracy from 1-step ahead prediction to 14-step ahead prediction assessed by both mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE). Max error, MAPE, and RMSE show that chaotic models were more reliable than the other three models. As chaotic models do not involve random walk, their performance does not vary while ANN and PLS-SVM make different forecasts in each trial. Moreover, this chaotic model was less time consuming than ANN and PLS-SVM models.