Accepted Manuscript

Factor analysis and forecasting of CO2 emissions in Hebei, using extreme

learning machine based on particle swarm optimization

Wei Sun, Caifei Wang, Chongchong Zhang

PII: S0959-6526(17)31185-X

DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.06.016

Reference: JCLP 9766

To appear in: Journal of Cleaner Production

Received Date: 21 January 2017

Revised Date: 02 June 2017

Accepted Date: 03 June 2017

Please cite this article as: Wei Sun, Caifei Wang, Chongchong Zhang, Factor analysis and
forecasting of CO2 emissions in Hebei, using extreme learning machine based on particle swarm
optimization, Journal of Cleaner Production (2017), doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.06.016

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 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT

Factor analysis and forecasting of CO2 emissions in Hebei, using

extreme learning machine based on particle swarm optimization

Wei Suna, Caifei Wangb,*, Chongchong Zhangc

Department of Business Administration, North China Electric Power University,
Baoding 071000, China
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +8615028250807.
E-mail address: 840400817@qq.com (C. Wang).

Abstract

In the prevailing low-carbon economy, China is under enormous pressure to

control CO2 emissions, therefore, of great significance is the study to analyze what

influential factors mainly contribute to emissions, so as to forecast emissions

accurately and harness the growth from the source. In this paper, basing on 22

influencing factors identified by bivariate correlation analysis, factor analysis is then

adopted to extract the latent factors which essentially affect emissions and 8 special

factors transformed by scoring coefficients are acquired. Extreme learning machine

(ELM) whose input weights and bias threshold were optimized by particle swarm

optimization (PSO), hereafter referred as PSO-ELM, is established to predict CO2

emissions and testify the availability of the factor analysis. Case studies reveal that the

factor analysis which generates 8 factors as input can highly improve prediction

accuracy. And the simulation results demonstrate that the built model PSO-ELM

outperforms the compared ELM and back propagation neural network in forecasting

CO2 emissions. Eventually, the analysis made in this study can provide valuable

policy implications for Hebei’s CO2 emissions reduction and strategic low-carbon

development.
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Keywords:

CO2 emissions, extreme learning machine, particle swarm optimization algorithm,

factor analysis

1 Introduction

Drawing high attention from the international society, global climate change has

become one of the most tough challenges faced by most countries. As the

predominant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide contributes approximately 63% to the

greenhouse effect, becoming primary cause for the climate change. At present, China,

proved to be the second largest energy consumer, energy importer and the biggest

emitter of CO2 in the world, has been in the spotlight. During the twelfth “Five-Year”

plan, China is dedicated to reduce carbon intensity by 40-50% by 2020. Advancing

with times, the target that carbon emissions of China will reach its peak in 2030 is put

forward in 2016 through the thirteenth “Five-Year” plan.

In view of the claims mentioned above, researches concerning scientific forecast

methods based on deep analysis of influential factors are entailed for predicting CO2

emissions and then matching effectual measures must be taken to reduce emissions.

Throughout recent studies, various methods employed to analyze CO2 emissions

can be classified into 2 categories, one is the analysis on influence factors of CO2

emissions, and the other is predicting CO2 emissions on the basis of influencing

factors.

In the case of factors associated with CO2 emissions, there are three major

methods: (1) structural decomposition analysis such as input-output method (Wei and
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Huang, 2016); (2) index decomposition analysis mainly encompassing Laspeyres

decomposition (Schipper, 2013) and Divisia decomposition (Vaninsky, 2014); (3)

statistical analysis, containing grey relational analysis (Huang, 2016), cluster analysis

(Liimatainen, 2014), principal component analysis (Antanasijevic, 2014) and so on.

From the perspective of the content and extending factor analytic methods, a wealth

of researches has been conducted in differing ways. Regarding concrete factors,

emphasis is placed on industrial department which can be subdivided into cement

industry (Summerbell, 2016), iron and steel industry (Sun, 2012) and power industry

(Karmellos, 2016), transportation department (Mishina, 2011), urban areas (Lee,

2014) and others. For specific factor analytic methods, logarithmic mean divisia index

(Wang, 2017), adaptive weighted divisia (Greening and Davis, 1998) or else

combined with kaya model (Duro, 2013) and so on are prevailing in factors analysis

of CO2 emissions. In general, statistical analysis is capable of processing multivariate

situation so that influential factors can be considered more comprehensive.

In regard to the second part, there is abundant literature on estimation of CO2

emissions, most of which vary in constructed models. Tudor (2016) attempted to

forecast the evolution of carbon dioxide emissions in Bahrain over the 2012-2021

decade by employing seven Automated Forecasting Methods, including the

exponential smoothing state space model (ETS), the Holt-Winters Model, the

BATS/TBATS model, ARIMA, the structural time series model (STS), the naive

model, and the neural network time series forecasting method (NNAR), which arrived

at the conclusion that Bahrain cannot meet its assumed target. Another study by Wang
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(2017) clearly demonstrated the influence of various factors related to energy on CO2

emissions that are different in three development stages by using an extended

STIRPAT model based on the classical IPAT identify. Otherwise, vector auto-

regression model (Xu and Lin, 2015a), DDEPM method (Zhao and Liu, 2013) and

other original methods were used to study CO2 emissions by scholars at home and

abroad.

However, compared with the model referred above, artificial intelligence

technology are overwhelmingly exploited in forecasting CO2 emissions due to its

strong nonlinear fitting capability, robustness, self-learning ability and so forth in

recent years. Back propagation neural network (BPNN), singly or in conjunction with

miscellaneous algorithm such as genetic algorithm (GA) proposed by Sun and Ye

(2016) are wielded extensively within the realm of predicting CO2 emissions.

Furthermore, support vector machine (SVM) (Mladenovic, Sokolov et al., 2016) and

least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) (Sun and Liu, 2016), along with

plenty of mixed models offer viewpoints into forecast. In consideration of discrepant

objects and circumstance, the advent of scenario analysis (Rayle and Pai, 2010)

facilitates the construes on CO2 emissions under feasible scenario settings.

Nonetheless, flaws such as easily plunging into local optimum，over-fitting and poor

generalization capability still remain.

Summing up researches of predecessors, this thesis considers more influential

elements in Hebei to study CO2 emissions and utilizes factor analysis to seek common

factors, which furnishes more entry points for emission mitigation measures. In
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addition, the hybrid model PSO-ELM is firstly introduced for CO2 emissions

forecasting with high precision in this article.

The innovation and contribution of the present study mainly lies in the following

aspects. First, this paper comprehensively considers 22 influential factors and make

bivariate correlation analysis to identify there existing real relevance between selected

indicators and CO2 emissions. In this foundation, total factors are divided into 6

categories based on relativity and economic connotation. And factor analysis which

extends the common statistical approaches is introduced to decrease variables’

dimensions without distortion and dig out potential factors hiding in the 6 classes.

Then, extreme learning machine based on particle swarm optimization, tapping PSO

into optimizing the weight of input layer and the bias of hidden layer in ELM, is

applied in Hebei for CO2 emissions prediction from 1995 to 2014. The proposed PSO-

ELM not only maximize the merit of PSO’s global search capability and ELM’s fast

learning speed, but also overcome the inherent instability of ELM. Through case

studies, taking the factors uncovered by factor analysis as input variables for PSO-

ELM, there is evidence that the hybrid model makes a favorable performance in

contrast to other ELM and BPNN methods.

2 Methodology

2.1 Particle swarm optimization algorithm

Proposed by Kennedy and Eberhart (1995) in 1995, PSO calls the bird “particle”.

Each particle represents a potential optimal solution of the problem, initialized at the

commencement of the iterations by position, velocity and fitness value, among them,
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the velocity determines the direction and the distance of the particle.

To explore the best position, particle’s position calculated by fitness function

was updated by tracking two extremes, one is called Pbest which is the optimal position

found by the particle itself, and the other called Gbest is the global best position of the

entire swarm currently.

Supposed in the D-dimensional search space, the swarm consists of n particles,

and the ith of which can be expressed by Xi = (xi1, xi2, …, xiD)T. Subsequently, the

velocity and the Pbest of the ith particle are respectively stated as Vi = (vi1, vi2, …, viD)T

and Pi = (pi1, pi2, …, piD)T. The finest position of all is similarly denoted as Pg = (Pg1,

Pg2, ..., PgD). Afterwards, the core of PSO is as following:

Vidk 1  wVidk  c1rand1 ( Pidk  X idk )  c2 rand 2 ( Pgdk  X idk ), (1)

X idk 1  X idk  Vk 1id k  1,2,..., n; d  1,2,..., D , (2)

Where wi conceived as inertia weight can modify the search coverage. c1 and c2

are acceleration factors equal to 1.49445. Then, rand1 and rand2 are generated

uniformly in the interval [0, 1]. To avert blind searching, particles’ position and

velocity are limited in [-Xmax , Xmax] and [-Vmax , Vmax] separately.

2.2 Extreme learning machine

Extreme learning machine introduced by Huang (2006) is an innovative

algorithm based on single hidden layer feed-forward neural network (SFLN). SLFN

adopts gradient descent algorithm to adjust the weights and parameters in training

process. Nevertheless, multiple parameters that need to update during each iteration

and chain of driring principle lead to SLFN unsuitable for the problem of large scale
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neural network.

In order to address those, ELM, as shown in Fig. 1, was put forward and adopted

the Moore-penrose inverse to calculate output matrices of the hidden layer, turning

training program into striving for the solution of the least square problem. Meanwhile,

with the random setting of input weights and bias of hidden layer, ELM immensely

accelerates the learning speed and strengthens the generalization ability. As a

consequence, ELM has been widely applied in regression, fitting, classification,

pattern recognition and other fields.

Hidden layer
Input layer Output layer

x beta y
w
...
...

...

Fig. 1 Topological structure of ELM.

Although ELM has a desirable performance in most cases, there are still some

shortcomings reducing accuracy. In the learning process, the possible non-optimal or

unnecessary weight values and thresholds will degrade the performance of ELM and

result in unstable results. In addition, ELM requires for plenty of hidden layer nodes

to achieve desired results in some practical applications, but excessive nodes shall add

complications and make it prone to over-fitting.

2.3 An extreme learning machine based on particle swarm

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optimization

Aiming at the above problems, this thesis proposes an extreme learning

machine based on PSO (PSO-ELM) which taps PSO into optimizing the weights of

input layer and the bias of hidden layer in ELM, and thereby obtains an optimal

network whose flowchart is in Fig. 2. In part 1, the influencing factors of CO2

emissions are identified by bivariate correlation analysis and on the basis of this,

factor analysis is used for extracting input variables. Part 2 is the particle swarm

optimization algorithm and part 3 is the forecasting of extreme learning machine.

Part 1
22 Indicators
Bivariate correlation
Input factors Factor analysis Start
analysis
CO2 emissions

Initializing particles’Xi and The topological

Part 2 structure of ELM Part 3
Vi and setting parameters by
PSO

Initializing ELM connection

Error of Training by ELM weight w and bias threshold b
served as fitness function

Optimum w and b
Searching for pid and Pgd

Updating vid and xid Optimum matrix of the output

weights β

Renewal of the fitness value

Forecasting CO2
emission using ELM

Updating pid and pgd

N Output

Y
Terminal condition

Fig. 2 Flowchart of the PSO-ELM model.

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3 Data analysis in SPSS

3.1 Data conversion and factor pre-selection

The present study analyzes the carbon dioxide emissions and it’s factors of Hebei

province in China from 1995 to 2014, where the data stems from “China Statistical

Yearbook” and “Hebei Economic Yearbook”.

However, the statistical information of carbon dioxide emissions isn’t directly

disclosed, which must be converted through pertinent coefficients. In accordance with

the coefficients promulgated in the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse

Gas Inventories (IPCC, 2006), CO2 emissions is calculated through different types of

energy consumption that the unit has been transformed as standard coal. From the

results presented in figure 3, CO2 emissions in Hebei accounted for about 6.7 percent

of the nation, occupying a considerable scale. And conversion coefficients of the three

energies which foremost induce CO2 emissions, are listed in Tab. 1.

Fig. 3 CO2 emissions of Hebei province and China.

Table 1

Conversion coefficients of CO2 emissions for various energies

Energy Coal Crude oil Natural gas Primary Power

Coefficient(C/t/t) 0.747 0.585 0.448 1.814

With regard to the factors affecting CO2 emissions in Hebei, taking

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comprehensive consideration of economy, energy and other relating aspects, this

article pre-selects 22 indicators: GDP of primary industry, secondary industry and

tertiary industry, total export, level of urbanization, coal consumption, production of

cement, steel and vehicle, power generation, R&D, general public budget expenditure,

total investment in fixed assets, investment in the treatment of industrial pollution,

owned automobile quantity, coverage of railway and highway, household

consumption, final consumption expenditure, urban green areas, ownership structure

which is the quotient of employment in state-owned units and overall employment,

and the fuel and power purchase price index.

3.2 Bivariate correlation analysis

Bivariate correlation analysis and the two-tailed significance test in SPSS were

preliminary used to verify the relevance between carbon dioxide emissions and pre-

selected factors, and the Pearson coefficient was reckoned to reflect the relatedness.

As illustrated in Table 2, entire factors are tightly linked with CO2 emissions, passing

through the two-tailed significance test at the confidence level of 99% universally.

Table 2

Bivariate correlation of CO2 and various factors

Indicator Pearson correlation Indicator Pearson correlation

Primary industry GDP 0.956** Coverage of railway 0.983**

Secondary industry GDP 0.961** Coverage of highway 0.961**

Tertiary industry GDP 0.946** Urban green areas 0.991**

R&D 0.88** Household consumption 0.948**

Level of urbanization 0.990** Ownership structure -0.985**

Total export 0.953** Owned automobile quantity 0.897**

Coal consumption 0.998** Final consumption expenditure 0.955**

Production of cement 0.97** Total investment in fixed assets 0.898**

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Production of steel 0.964** General public budget expenditure 0.899**

Production of vehicle 0.930** The fuel and power purchase price index 0.966**

Power generation 0.98** Investment in the treatment of industrial pollution 0.688**

Note: ** denotes a significant correlation at the significance level of 1%.

Despite the feasible selections of the influencing elements, abounding variables

and a certain degree of correlation between variables may put the subsequent research

to some inconvenience and deviation. Therefore, this paper employs factor analysis in

SPSS to process variables and further identify the latent common factors which

virtually impacts the experimental subject.

3.3 Factor analysis

First submitted by British psychologist C.E. Spearman, factor analysis refers to a

statistical technique that can explore common factors from the variable group.

Laboratory data collected tends to be not independent, in view of this, highly

interrelated variables are classified into one group, thus, rendering the same group of

variables with fairly correlation and different groups of variables less associated.

Those variables within one group can be substituted by a mutual thing that is

distinguished as a common factor. Not only does factor analysis reduce indicators’

dimensions, but also the common factors it elicited to portray and replace primitive

variables can commendably mirror and explain the complicated relationship between

variables, keeping data messages with essentially no less and facilitating the later

research.

After correlation analysis for the pre-selection factors, indicators are divided into

6 categories based on relativity and economic connotation: comprehensive strength,

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energy intensive industry, investment, consumption, city and transportation, aiming to

refrain variables’ dimensions from being considerably plummeted, merely because of

the relevance on value. Taking the type of energy intensive industry as an example,

factor analysis are shown in Table 3.

In Table 3, there is one common factor whose contribution rate up to 96.965%

hiding in the four indicators. First, statistic value of Kaiser Meyer Olkin (KMO) that

served as the criteria to judge whether factor analysis can be done is 0.785, more than

0.7, really suitable for factor analysis. Whilst the probability of barlett test of

sphericity is 0.000, rejecting the null hypothesis and denying the correlation matrix is

a unit matrix. In conclusion, the common factor indicated as F2 in this article, is

nominated as energy consumption factor.

Likewise, the results of KMO and others can be attained from the following

Table 4 to 8. Particularly, in Table 4, two common factors are extracted through factor

rotation to vividly construe the indicators. If nothing but F11 was determined, the

group can only be decoded by 53.922%, whereas coupled with F12, the accumulative

contribution rate of the two factors can be 96.965% . As we can see, GDP of primary

industry, secondary industry and tertiary industry have greater load on F11 than export,

as opposed to export loading more on F12, thus, F11 and F12 is designated as output

value factor and export factor respectively. Similarly, F31 and F32 are parts of the

investment factor, named as general investment factor and pollution investment

factor. F4, F5, F6 are separately defined as consumption factor, city factor and

transportation factor as well.

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Table 3

Factor analysis of energy intensive industry

Indicator Loading of F2 Scoring coefficient of F2 Index Value

Production of cement 0.965 0.249 KMO 0.785

Production of steel 0.994 0.256 Bartlett's test 181.367

Production of vehicle 0.984 0.254 Prob. 0.000

Power generation 0.997 0.257 Contribution rate 96.965%

Table 4

Factor analysis of comprehensive strength

Indicator Loading of F11 F12 Scoring coefficient of F11 F12 Index Value

GDP of primary industry 0.765 0.643 0.643 -1.242 KMO 0.838

GDP of secondary industry 0.749 0.662 0.662 -0.472 Bartlett's test 250.755

GDP of tertiary industry 0.776 0.629 0.629 -1.77 Prob. 0.000

Total export 0.639 0.769 0.769 4.192 Contribution rate 99.897%

Table 5

Factor analysis of investment

Indicator Loading of F31 F32 Scoring coefficient of F31 F32 Index Value

R&D 0.765 0.643 1.488 -1.242 KMO 0.843

General public budget

0.749 0.662 0.778 -0.472 Bartlett's test 142.724
expenditure

Total investment in fixed

0.776 0.629 1.975 -1.77 Prob. 0.000
assets

Investment in the treatment

0.639 0.769 -3.528 4.192 Contribution rate 99.255%
of industrial pollution

Table 6

Factor analysis of consumption

Indicator Loading of F4 Scoring coefficient of F4 Index Value

Household consumption 0.986 0.256 KMO 0.704

Final consumption expenditure 0.989 0.256 Bartlett's test 215.552

Coal consumption 0.974 0.254 Prob. 0.000

The fuel and power purchase price index 0.98 0.253 Contribution rate 96.414%
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Table 7

Factor analysis of city

Indicator Loading of F5 Scoring coefficient of F5 Index Value

Level of urbanization 0.998 0.335 KMO 0.781

Urban green areas 0.995 0.334 Bartlett's test 140.51

Ownership structure -0.997 -0.335 Prob. 0.000

Contribution rate 99.298%

Table 8

Factor analysis of transportation

Indicator Loading of F6 Scoring coefficient of F6 Index Value

Owned automobile quantity 0.952 0.339 KMO 0.785

Coverage of railway 0.977 0.348 Bartlett's test 181.367

Coverage of highway 0.973 0.346 Prob. 0.000

Contribution rate 93.637%

To sum up, six classes of factors, actually 8 factors, are obtained as input for the

forecasting model, containing output value factor F11 and export factor F12, energy

consumption factor F2, general investment factor F31 and pollution investment factor

F32, consumption factor F4, city factor F5 and transportation factor F6. Transformed by

scoring coefficients in Table 3-8, specific factor variables are constructed. As a

consequence, the following study will take the 8 factors as input variables to predict

CO2 emissions in Hebei.

3.4 Application of the PSO-ELM

To examine the rational alternative of factors, the PSO-ELM model was applied

in Hebei’s carbon dioxide emission forecasting. Meanwhile, root mean square error

(RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) are in the utilization of

checking PSO-ELM’s performance. The equations of the two error criterion are as

below:
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2
1 n yˆ t  yt
RMSE  
n t 1 yt
(3)

1 n yˆ t  yt
MAPE  
n t 1 yt
*100% (4)

Where n stands for the quantity of the test sample, yt is the tth real CO2

emissions, while ŷt is the matching predicted output.

It was PSO that optimized the matrix of output weight in ELM. In PSO, the max-

generation = 100, the size of population = 50, whilst in ELM, nodes of the hidden

layer is 20, and the rest parameters are setting as Table 9.

Table 9

Parameters’ setting of the PSO-ELM model

Parameters Value

The maximum number of velocity 0.5

The minimum number of velocity -0.5

The maximum number of population 5

The minimum number of population -5

4 Results and discussion

The integral procedure of PLO-ELM was executed by MATLAB 2016a. In

addition to demonstrating the reasonableness of factors’ selection and processing, the

present study also makes comparisons with different models, including back

propagation neural network (BPNN) and ELM, to testify the effectiveness of PSO-

ELM.

As illustrated in Fig.3, it can apparently draw the conclusion that the fitting curve

from 2010 to 2014 of the suggested PSO-ELM model is superior to others in CO2

emissions forecasting of Hebei. Relatively, the tracks of ELM algorithm and BPNN

model have a worse fitting effect with some predicted points deviating from the
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authentic values.

Fig.4 Fitting curves of the four predictions and desired output

Simultaneously, from the perspective of error criterion, Table 10 reveals that

both RMSE and MAPE of PSO-ELM are less than other two models, exhibiting high

prediction exactitude. As for BPNN, the value of MAPE is higher than ELM and

PSO-ELM about 1.15% and 2.02%. Moreover, results forecast by ELM have already

shown a good precision for its MAPE value is merely 1.18%. Nonetheless, the

improved ELM --- PSO-ELM whose MAPE and RMSE are only 0.31% and 91.63,

achieves a pretty good consequence. According to the results, not only are the factors

selected by factor analysis available and efficient, but also the PSO-ELM model is

proved to be applicable.

Table 10

Error analysis of the compared models

PSO-ELM ELM BPNN

RMSE(million tons) 91.63 317.22 660.15

MAPE(%) 0.31% 1.18% 2.33%

Furthermore, attending to the input factors which converted by 22 primitive

indicators, the accurate predictions further corroborated that total factors or the basic

indicators do have practical impacts on CO2 emissions in Hebei, which provides

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orientation and conception for policy makers regarding CO2 emissions reduction.

Considering F2, highly energy-consuming industries including steel, cement,

vehicle and others are the leading contributors to manufacturing industry’s CO2

emissions in China (Xu and Lin, 2016). Corresponding measures like reorganization

of migratory large industrial enterprises, carbon emissions trading and so on must be

intensively implemented. As we know, power supply in F2, mainly depends on

thermal power units in Hebei, so that replacing small units with large ones, oxy-fuel

enriched combustion to facilitate carbon capture and sequestration and clean energies

can strive to develop with the intention of reducing emissions.

Since referring to power, it is well known that coal reflected by the consumption

factor F4 is the primary fuel of the thermal power. Similarly emphasized in (Sun and

Xu, 2016), coal consumption offers insights into measures such as promotion of new

catalyst for coal combustion, usage of high quality coal, excise tax on coal and other

effective techniques.

As regards city factor F5, environmental issue is highlighted as an area for further

urbanization (Ouyang and Lin, 2017). Thus, beneficial is a head of pollution

managing and the augment of urban green area such as vertical planting and vacant

land afforests that can absorb already emitted CO2.

According to (Xu and Lin, 2015b), private cars leads to increased CO2 emissions

in the early stages of rapid growth, but with the increased use of electric and hybrid

cars and other advancement, it’s emissions intensity will gradually decline. In light of

this, discerning from the transportation factor F6, odd and even license plate rule, free
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public transits in special period, substitution of electric power for petrol and

congestion charge in big cities are fairly encouraged. As discussed previously, it has

been evident from this research, the government could carry out proper actions

directing at the 8 factors to harness CO2 emissions in Hebei.

5 Conclusion

In this article, 22 indexes are selected as influential factors of CO2 emissions in

Hebei, and based on the classification while considering correlation and economic

connotation of the total variables, 8 factors are eventually identified through factor

analysis. Afterwards, the 8 factors are input into PSO-ELM to forecast CO2

emissions. Through comparing the recommended model with other models

embodying ELM and BPNN, it is regarded as evident to conclude that: (1) Factor

analysis of the total selected indicators influencing CO2 emissions is available and

conducive to enhance predicting accuracy of the results; (2) Compared with other

methods, the PSO-ELM model has the lowest RMSE and MAPE values, which is

effective and promising in carbon dioxide emissions forecasting.

As we know, the onus is on China reducing CO2 emissions to achieve a low

carbon economy. Therefore, researches on CO2 emissions and its influential factors

are significant to provide data in support of governments’ negotiation in United

Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). And also it is a

reference for relevant agencies to take mitigation measures and improve carbon

trading market internally and externally. Compared with most previous studies, factor

analysis applied in this paper takes more influencing factors of CO2 emissions into
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consideration, which offers policy makers more breakthrough points.

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