drawback — the frequent appearance of mode mixing, which is defined as a single IMF either
consisting of signals of widely disparate scales, or a signal of a similar scale residing in different
IMF components. To overcome the problem,Wu and Huang (2004) proposed EEMD. The basic
idea of EEMD is that each observed data are amalgamations of the true time series and noise.
Thus even if data are collected by separate observations, each with a different noise level, the
ensemble mean is close to the true time series. Therefore, an additional step is taken by adding
white noise thatmay help extract the true signal in the data. The procedure of EEMDis developed
as follows:
1) Add a white noise series to the targeted data;
2) Decompose the data with added white noise into IMFs;
3) Repeat step 1 and step 2 iteratively, but with different white noise series each time; and obtain
the (ensemble) means of corresponding IMFs of the decompositions as the final result.
The added white noise series present a uniform reference frame in the time–frequency and
time–scale space for signals of comparable scales to collate in one IMF and then cancel itself out
(via ensemble averaging), after serving its purpose; therefore, it significantly reduces the chance
of mode mixing and represents a substantial improvement over the original EMD. The effect of
the added white noise can be controlled according to the well-established statistical rule proved by
Wu and Huang (2004):
en ¼
e
pffiNffiffiffi : ð4Þ
Where N is the number of ensemble members, ε is the amplitude of the added noise, and εn is
the final standard deviation of error, which is defined as the difference between the input signal
and the corresponding IMFs. In practice, the number of ensemble members is often set to 100 and
the standard deviation of white noise series is set to 0.1 or 0.2.
3. Decomposition
Through EEMD, crude oil price data series can be decomposed into a set of independent IMFs
with different scales, plus the residue. The analyses of these IMFs and the residue help explore the
variability and formation of crude oil price from a new perspective.
3.1. Data
The monthly data of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil spot price, which is treated as
the benchmark crude oil price for international oil markets, are used in our analysis.
Fig. 1 shows the data series of WTI from Jan. 1946 to May 2006. In our experiments, three
subdata sets of WTI are used. The first one is all the monthly data from Jul. 1946 to May 2005,
512 data points in total. The long time range of this data set helps extract more information and
analyze crude oil price from a long term view. The inclusion of crude oil price in different time
periods, having different characteristics, does not affect the final results since EEMD is local. The
other two data sets just cover the period from Jul. 2000 to May 2006, but one is weekly data of
308 data points and the other is monthly data of 71 data points. The shorter period lets us focus on
features of recent periods of high oil price and the different frequencies of data allow us to explore
the features of crude oil price in different frequency ranges.