Forecasting natural gas production and consumption using grey model with latent information function: The cases of China and USA

This paper aimed to develop a grey model for short-term forecasting of natural gas consumption and production in China and USA. To enhance the prediction accuracy of the proposed model, the outliers were determined by the error of the latent information function and then, they were corrected according to the test sample and the future trend. The sequence with corrected outliers was used to construct a grey model. The proposed model was employed to predict the natural gas consumption and production in China and USA. The results demonstrated that the proposed model could raise the forecast accuracy of the grey model. In addition, it was shown that China would inevitably face a massive expansion of natural gas imports.