The movements in oil prices are complex and, therefore, seem to be
unpredictable. The traditional linear structural models have not been
promising when applied to forecasting, particularly in the case of complex
series such as oil prices. Although linear and nonlinear time series models
have done much better job in forecasting oil prices, there is yet room for an
improvement. If the data generating process is nonlinear, applying linear
models could result in misleading forecasts. Model specification in nonlinear
modeling can also be very case dependent and time-consuming.
In this paper, we model and forecast daily futures oil price, listed in
NYMEX, applying ARIMA, and GARCH models, for the period April June
1983 - Jan. 2003. Then, we test for chaos using BDS, Lyapunov exponent,
Neural Networks, and Embedding Dimension methods. Finally, we will set
up a nonlinear and flexible ANN model to forecast the series. Since the tests
for chaos indicate that the oil price in futures markets is chaotic, the ANN
model should make better forecasts. The forecasts comparison among the
models approves that.