Abstract

To address the difficulty of accurately capturing the dynamic patterns of carbon emission time series—characterized by nonlinearity, non-stationarity, and complex fluctuations—this paper proposes a carbon emission prediction model based on an elite-guided collaborative social spider learning optimization algorithm (EGC-SSLO) integrated with a Long short-term memory (LSTM) network. First, considering the limitations of the standard stochastic social learning optimization (SSLO) algorithm in complex high-dimensional optimization problems, such as insufficient elite information guidance, weak local exploitation in the later stages, and a tendency to become trapped in local optima, three complementary improvement strategies are introduced. The adaptive elite mean-guided search strategy enhances the search directionality by incorporating the cooperative information of the best individual and the elite mean. The worst-individual hybrid Cauchy–Lévy search mechanism achieves a dynamic balance between early-stage global exploration and late-stage local exploitation through long-range Lévy flights and fine-grained Cauchy perturbations. The quadratic directional exploitation strategy further refines the search trajectory of candidate solutions, thereby improving convergence accuracy. These three strategies significantly enhance the optimization performance without increasing the time complexity order of the algorithm. Experimental results on the CEC2017 (30-dimensional), CEC2020 (20-dimensional), and CEC2022 (20-dimensional) benchmark suites demonstrate that EGC-SSLO consistently outperforms classical algorithms such as PSO, GWO, and HHO, as well as their improved variants, in terms of convergence accuracy, convergence speed, and robustness. Furthermore, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Friedman test confirm that the observed improvements are statistically significant. Finally, an EGC-SSLO-LSTM carbon emission prediction model is constructed and applied to daily carbon emission data in China from 2019 to 2025 for empirical analysis. The experimental findings show that the EGC-SSLO-LSTM model markedly outperforms both the standard LSTM and SSLO-LSTM approaches across key evaluation metrics, including mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and the coefficient of determination (R2). In particular, the MAE is decreased by 39.9% and 4.64% compared with the two benchmark models, respectively, which highlights the strong effectiveness and practical potential of the proposed method in real-world carbon emission forecasting applications.

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