Although over a thousand scientific papers address the topic of load forecasting every year, only a few are dedicated to finding a general framework for load forecasting that improves the performance, without depending on the unique characteristics of a certain task such as geographical location. Meta-learning, a powerful approach for algorithm selection has so far been demonstrated only on univariate time-series forecasting. Multivariate timeseries forecasting is known to have better performance in load forecasting. In this paper we propose a meta-learning system for multivariate time-series forecasting as a general framework for load forecasting model selection. We show that a meta-learning system built on 65 load forecasting tasks returns lower forecasting error than 10 well-known forecasting algorithms on 4 load forecasting tasks for a recurrent real-life simulation. We introduce new metafeatures of fickleness, traversity, granularity and highest ACF. The meta-learning framework is parallelized, component-based and easily extendable.

Accurate forecasting tools are essential in the operation of electric power systems, especially in deregulated electricity markets. Electricity price forecasting is necessary for all market participants to optimize their portfolios. In this paper we propose a hybrid method approach for short-term hourly electricity price forecasting. The paper combines statistical techniques for pre-processing of data and a multi-layer (MLP) neural network for forecasting electricity price and price spike detection. Based on statistical analysis, days are arranged into several categories. Similar days are examined by correlation significance of the historical data. Factors impacting the electricity price forecasting, including historical price factors, load factors and wind production factors are discussed. A price spike index (CWI) is defined for spike detection and forecasting. Using proposed approach we created several forecasting models of diverse model complexity. The method is validated using the European Energy Exchange (EEX) electricity price data records. Finally, results are discussed with respect to price volatility, with emphasis on the price forecasting accuracy.

In power systems, task of load forecasting is important for keeping equilibrium between production and consumption. With liberalization of electricity markets, task of load forecasting changed because each market participant has to forecast their own load. Consumption of end-consumers is stochastic in nature. Due to competition, suppliers are not in a position to transfer their costs to end-consumers; therefore it is essential to keep forecasting error as low as possible. Numerous papers are investigating load forecasting from the perspective of the grid or production planning. We research forecasting models from the perspective of a supplier. In this paper, we investigate different combinations of exogenous input on the simulated supplier loads and show that using points of delivery as a feature for Support Vector Regression leads to lower forecasting error, while adding customer number in different datasets does the opposite.

Division of a time series into segments is a common technique for time-series processing, and is known as segmentation. Segmentation is traditionally done by linear interpolation in order to guarantee the continuity of the reconstructed time series. The interpolation-based segmentation methods may perform poorly for data with a level of noise because interpolation is noise sensitive. To handle the problem, this paper establishes an explicit expression for segmentation from a compact representation for piecewise linear functions using hinging hyperplanes. This expression enables the use of regression to obtain a continuous reconstructed signal and, as a consequence, application of advanced techniques in segmentation. In this paper, a least squares support vector machine with lasso using a hinging feature map is given and analyzed, based on which a segmentation algorithm and its online version are established. Numerical experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of our methods compared to existing segmentation algorithms.