Influencing factors and prediction of carbon dioxide emissions using factor analysis and optimized least squares support vector machine

As the energy and environmental problems are increasingly severe, researches about carbon dioxide emissions has aroused widespread concern. The accurate prediction of carbon dioxide emissions is essential for carbon emissions controlling. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and influencing factors in a comprehensive way through correlation analysis and regression analysis, achieving the effective screening of key factors from 16 preliminary selected factors including GDP, total population, total energy consumption, power generation, steel production coal consumption, private owned automobile quantity, etc. Then fruit fly algorithm is used to optimize the parameters of least squares support vector machine. And the optimized model is used for prediction, overcoming the blindness of parameter selection in least squares support vector machine and maximizing the training speed and global searching ability accordingly. The results show that the prediction accuracy of carbon dioxide emissions is improved effectively. Besides, we conclude economic and environmental policy implications on the basis of analysis and calculation.