EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Forecasting automobile gasoline demand in Australia using machine learning-based regression

Zheng Li, Bo Zhou and David Hensher

Energy, 2022, vol. 239, issue PD

Abstract: We use a variant of machine learning (ML) to forecast Australia's automobile gasoline demand within an autoregressive and structural model. By comparing the outputs of various model specifications, we find that training set selection plays an important role in forecasting accuracy. More specifically, however, the performance of training sets starting within identified systematic patterns is relatively worse, and the impact on forecast errors is substantial. We explain these systematic variations in machine learning performance, and explore the intuition behind the ‘black-box’ with the support of economic theory. An important finding is that these time points coincide with structural changes in Australia's economy. By examining the out-of-sample forecasts, the model's external validity can be demonstrated under normal situations; however, its forecasting performance is somewhat unsatisfactory under event-driven uncertainty, which calls on future research to develop alternative models to depict the characteristics of rare and extreme events in an ex-ante manner.

Keywords: Energy demand forecasting; Machine learning; Time series; Structural changes; Automobile sector (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221025603
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:239:y:2022:i:pd:s0360544221025603

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2021.122312

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:energy:v:239:y:2022:i:pd:s0360544221025603