Reliable wind speed forecasting is essential for wind power integration in wind power generation system. The purpose of paper is to develop a novel hybrid model for short-term wind speed forecasting and demonstrates its efficiency. In the proposed model, a compound structure of extreme learning machine (ELM) based on feature selection and parameter optimization using hybrid backtracking search algorithm (HBSA) is employed as the predictor. The real-valued BSA (RBSA) is exploited to search for the optimal combination of weights and bias of ELM while the binary-valued BSA (BBSA) is exploited as a feature selection method applying on the candidate inputs predefined by partial autocorrelation function (PACF) values to reconstruct the input-matrix. Due to the volatility and randomness of wind speed signal, an optimized variational mode decomposition (OVMD) is employed to eliminate the redundant noises. The parameters of the proposed OVMD are determined according to the center frequencies of the decomposed modes and the residual evaluation index (REI). The wind speed signal is decomposed into a few modes via OVMD. The aggregation of the forecasting results of these modes constructs the final forecasting result of the proposed model. The proposed hybrid model has been applied on the mean half-hour wind speed observation data from two wind farms in Inner Mongolia, China and 10-min wind speed data from the Sotavento Galicia wind farm are studied as an additional case. Parallel experiments have been designed to compare with the proposed model. Results obtained from this study indicate that the proposed hybrid model can provide an effective modeling approach to capture the nonlinear characteristics of wind speed signal and thus providing more satisfactory forecasting results. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.