Wind power prediction is an important research topic in the wind power industry and many prediction algorithms have recently been studied for the sake of achieving the goal of improving the accuracy of short-term forecasting in an effective way. To tackle the issue of generating a huge transition matrix in the traditional Markov model, this paper introduces a real-time forecasting method that reduces the required calculation time and memory space without compromising the prediction accuracy of the original model. This method is capable of obtaining the state probability interval distribution for the next moment through real-time calculation while preserving the accuracy of the original model. Furthermore, the proposed Markov-based Back Propagation (BP) neural network was optimized using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm in order to effectively improve the prediction approach with an improved PSO-BP neural network. Compared with traditional methods, the computing time of our improved algorithm increases linearly, instead of growing exponentially. Additionally, the optimized Markov-based PSO-BP neural network produced a better predictive effect. We observed that the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of the prediction model were 12.7% and 179.26, respectively; compared with the existing methods, this model generates more accurate prediction results.