Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely-used tool for measuring the overall situation of a country’s economic activity within a specified period of time. A more accurate forecasting of GDP based on standardized procedures with known samples available is conducive to guide decision making of government, enterprises and individuals. This study devotes to enhance the accuracy regarding GDP forecasting with given sample of historical data. To achieve this purpose, the study incorporates artificial neural network (ANN) into grey Markov chain model to modify the residual error, thus develops a novel hybrid model called grey Markov chain with ANN error correction (abbreviated as GMCM_ANN), which assembles the advantages of three components to fit nonlinear forecasting with limited sample sizes. The new model has been tested by adopting the historical data, which includes the original GDP data of the United States, Japan, China and India from 2000 to 2019, and also provides predications on four countries’ GDP up to 2022. Four models including autoregressive integrated moving average model, back-propagation neural network, the traditional GM(1,1) and grey Markov chain model are as benchmarks for comparison of the predicted accuracy and application scope. The obtained results are satisfactory and indicate superior forecasting performance of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy and universality.
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