A study of univariate forecasting methods for crude oil price

PurposeThis paper aims to compare different univariate forecasting methods to provide a more accurate short-term forecasting model on the crude oil price for rendering a reference to manages.Design/methodology/approachSix different univariate methods, namely the classical decomposition model, the trigonometric regression model, the regression model with seasonal dummy variables, the grey forecast, the hybrid grey model and the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA), have been used.FindingsThe authors found that the grey forecast is a reliable forecasting method for crude oil prices.Originality/valueThe contribution of this research study is using a small size of data and comparing the forecasting results of the six univariate methods. Three commonly used evaluation criteria, mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute percent error (MAPE), were adopted to evaluate the model performance. The outcome of this work can help predict the crude oil price.