The technology of wind speed prediction is important to guarantee the safety of wind power utilization. In this paper, four different hybrid methods are proposed for the high-precision multi-step wind speed predictions based on the Adaboost (Adaptive Boosting) algorithm and the MLP (Multilayer Perceptron) neural networks. In the hybrid Adaboost-MLP forecasting architecture, four important algorithms are adopted for the training and modeling of the MLP neural networks, including GD-ALR-BP algorithm, GDM-ALR-BP algorithm, CG-BP-FR algorithm and BFGS algorithm. The aim of the study is to investigate the promoted forecasting percentages of the MLP neural networks by the Adaboost algorithm' optimization under various training algorithms. The hybrid models in the performance comparison include Adaboost-GD-ALR-BP-MLP, Adaboost-GDM-ALR-BP-MLP, Adaboost-CG-BP-FR-MLP, Adaboost-BFGS-MLP, GD-ALR-BP-MLP, GDM-ALR-BP-MLP, CG-BP-FR-MLP and BFGS-MLP. Two experimental results show that: (1) the proposed hybrid Adaboost-MLP forecasting architecture is effective for the wind speed predictions; (2) the Adaboost algorithm has promoted the forecasting performance of the MLP neural networks considerably; (3) among the proposed Adaboost-MLP forecasting models, the Adaboost-CG-BP-FR-MLP model has the best performance; and (4) the improved percentages of the MLP neural networks by the Adaboost algorithm decrease step by step with the following sequence of training algorithms as: GD-ALR-BP, GDM-ALR-BP, CG-BP-FR and BFGS. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.