Forecasting crude oil futures prices using Extreme Gradient Boosting.

Multi-source data is widely used in the field of energy future prices forecasting, the improvement of forecast ability and data screening are becoming the focus of current research. In this paper, two tree-based models (namely, Random Forest and XGBoost model) are employed to predict China's crude oil future prices. The empirical analysis confirms that Random Forest and XGBoost model have superior prediction performances than benchmark and the XGBoost model performs best. An important finding is that there is a time gap between investor information search and processing because the prediction performance within the time lags is obviously superior than that of the current period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]