Artificial neural networks have been widely used in time series prediction. In this paper, multi-layer feedforward neural networks with optimized structures, using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, are used for hourly load prediction based on load time series of IEEE Reliability Test System. To have a small and appropriate feature subset, a hybrid method is used for feature selection in this paper. This hybrid method uses the combination of genetic algorithm (GA) and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. The season, day of the week, time of the day and history load are considered as load influencing factors in this study based on the mentioned standard load dataset. The optimized number of neurons in the hidden layers of multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is determined using PSO algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid model offers superior performance, in terms of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), in time series prediction as compared to some recent researches in this field.