Forecasting education expenditure with a generalized conformable fractional-order nonlinear grey system model

As an important human capital investment, education is an effective means to improve the comprehensive quality of people. Education expenditure is an important material guarantee for the development of educational undertakings. Education expenditure data is highly susceptible to numerous economic and social factors that complicate its nonlinear structure. In order to model the complex nonlinear problems of the system, this paper proposes a generalized conformable fractional-order nonlinear grey prediction model for the first time by analyzing the traditional time series-based modeling method in a nonlinear grey domain. The proposed model expands on the classical grey Bernoulli model by introducing the generalized conformable fractional accumulation as a new accumulation generator and utilizes error minimization principles in the modeling process. By altering the optimal order of the model and the cumulative generation operator, this model can adapt to various time series and reduce errors. Finally, the model is applied to education expenditure forecasting, and it is proved that the proposed model achieved good results and has higher accuracy than other models.