Hybrid grey model to forecast monitoring series with seasonality

The grey forecasting model has been successfully applied to many fields. However, the precision of GM(1,1) model is not high. In order to remove the seasonal fluctuations in monitoring series before building GM(1,1) model, the forecasting series of GM(1,1) was built, and an inverse process was used to resume the seasonal fluctuations. Two deseasonalization methods were presented , i.e., seasonal index-based deseasonalization and standard normal distribution-based deseasonalization. They were combined with the GM(1,1) model to form hybrid grey models. A simple but practical method to further improve the forecasting results was also suggested. For comparison, a conventional periodic function model was investigated. The concept and algorithms were tested with four years monthly monitoring data. The results show that on the whole the seasonal index-GM(1,1) model outperform the conventional periodic function model and the conventional periodic function model outperform the SND-GM(1,1) model. The mean Absolute error and mean square error of seasonal index-GM(1,1) are 30.69% and 54.53% smaller than that of conventional periodic function model, respectively. The high accuracy, straightforward and easy implementation natures of the proposed hybrid seasonal index-grey model make it a powerful analysis technique for seasonal monitoring series.