Forecasting the Demand of Short-Term Electric Power Load with Large-Scale LP-SVR

Abstract

This research studies short-term electricity load prediction with a large-scalelinear programming support vector regression (LP-SVR) model. The LP-SVR is compared with other three non-linear regression models: Collobert’s SVR, Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN), and Bagged Regression Trees (BRT). The four models are trained to predict hourly day-ahead loads given temperature predictions, holiday information and historical loads. The models are trained on-hourly data from the New England Power Pool (NEPOOL) region from 2004 to 2007 and tested on out-of-sample data from 2008. Experimental results indicate that the proposed LP-SVR method gives the smallest error when compared against the other approaches. The LP-SVR shows a mean absolute percent error of 1.58% while the FFNN approach has a 1.61%. Similarly, the FFNN method shows a 330 MWh (Megawatts-hour) mean absolute error, whereas the LP-SVR approach gives a 238 MWh mean absolute error. This is a significant difference in terms of the extra power that would need to be produced if FFNN was used. The proposed LP-SVR model can be utilized for predicting power loads to a very low error, and it is comparable to FFNN and over-performs other state of the art methods such as: Bagged Regression Trees, and Large-Scale SVRs.