Electric load forecasting is an indispensable component of electric power system planning and management. Inaccurate load forecasting may lead to the threat of outages or a waste of energy. Accurate electric load forecasting is challenging when there is limited data or even no data, such as load forecasting in holiday, or under extreme weather conditions. As high-stakes decision-making usually follows after load forecasting, model interpretability is crucial for the adoption of forecasting models. In this paper, we propose an interactive GAM which is not only interpretable but also can incorporate specific domain knowledge in electric power industry for improved performance. This boosting-based GAM leverages piecewise linear functions and can be learned through our efficient algorithm. In both public benchmark and electricity datasets, our interactive GAM outperforms current state-of-the-art methods and demonstrates good generalization ability in the cases of extreme weather events. We launched a user-friendly web-based tool based on interactive GAM and already incorporated it into our eForecaster product, a unified AI platform for electricity forecasting. CCS CONCEPTS• Computing methodologies → Machine learning algorithms.

We propose a data-driven procedure, cross-estimation for decision selection (CrEDS), to choose from an abundance of off-the-shelf statistical models or computer algorithms at a decision-maker's disposal. CrEDS combines the ideas of cross-validation (CV) and local smoothing, a nonparametric statistical technique. We demonstrate the power of CrEDS with five numerical experiments in inventory and revenue management problems, ranging from low to high dimensional and from exogenous to endogenous. We also conduct a case study using an auto-lending data. CrEDS performs favorably compared to other existing selection criteria and provides a practical framework for a broad range of optimal decision selection problems.

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