A multi-stage method to predict carbon dioxide emissions using dimensionality reduction, clustering, and machine learning techniques

The main purpose of this paper is to develop an efficient multi-stage methodology to predict carbon dioxide emissions based on two important variables including the energy consumption and economic growth using the clustering, prediction machine learning techniques, and dimensionality reduction. To do so, we use the self-organizing map clustering algorithm to cluster the data and the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system and artificial neural network to construct the prediction models in each cluster of the self-organizing map to predict carbon dioxide emissions considering a set of input parameters including economic growth and energy consumption in Group 20 nations. Furthermore, we use the singular value decomposition for dimensionality reduction and missing values’ prediction in the dataset. The results of the analysis of a real-world dataset found that the developed multi-stage approach was capable of predicting the carbon dioxide emissions on two indicators. To validate the proposed method, the results are compared with other existing methods. The outcomes demonstrate that the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system and artificial neural network techniques combined with the self-organizing map and singular value decomposition technique provide 0.065 accuracy in terms of the mean average error. In addition, when comparing singular value decomposition-self-organizing map-adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system method with the singular value decomposition-self-organizing map-adaptive-artificial neural network method, the singular value decomposition-self-organizing map-adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference provides with 0.104 accuracy in predicting CO2 emissions. Moreover, the multiple linear regression provides the worst accuracy (0.522) results compared with the artificial neural network and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system techniques. The analysis regarding the relationship between economic development, carbon dioxide emissions, and the energy consumption is extremely vital from the energy and economic policy-making aspects in Group 20 countries given that the primary focus of this group has been the governance of the global economy.