A hybrid CNN-BiLSTM-attention model with feature engineering for accurate carbon emission forecasting
摘要
Accurate prediction of carbon emissions is essential for enabling government agencies to set scientific emission reduction targets and formulate targeted green development strategies. To enhance the accuracy and reliability of carbon emission forecasting, this study proposes a deep learning framework based on multi-dimensional feature fusion. By leveraging feature enhancement techniques, a multi-dimensional feature space is constructed, integrating the local feature extraction capability of Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) with the temporal dependency modeling strength of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM). This enables collaborative spatio-temporal feature extraction, while an attention mechanism dynamically allocates weights to key time-series nodes. Using China’s daily carbon emission data from 2019 to 2025 as the research subject, a multi-dimensional feature analysis framework is established. Through feature engineering, three types of variables, temporal, statistical, and time-series features, are systematically extracted to preliminarily explore emission fluctuation patterns and periodic trends. The integrated feature set is then fed into the hybrid model, and feature perturbation analysis is applied to quantify the contribution of each feature. Experimental results highlight the central role of time-series differences, rolling statistics, and lag features in carbon emission prediction. To validate the model’s effectiveness, a comparative experiment is designed using CNN, BiLSTM, and BiLSTM-Attention as benchmark models under identical test conditions. The proposed model achieves a Root Mean Square Error of 0.865 on the test set, representing an average reduction of 30% compared to baseline models, confirming its superior performance. Based on the findings, strategic recommendations are offered to guide optimized carbon emission control.