Feature selection and parameter optimization with GA-LSSVM in electricity price forecasting

• Main Authors: Intan Azmira , Abdul Razak, Izham , Zainal Abidin, Keem Siah, Yap, Titik Khawa, Abdul Rahman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Politehnica-Publishing House 2014
• Subjects: TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
• Online Access: http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/14821/1/doc.pdf; http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/14821/
• Institution: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka

Forecasting price has now become essential task in the operation of electrical power system. Power producers and customers use short term price forecasts to manage and plan for bidding approaches, and hence increasing the utility’s profit and energy efficiency as well. The main challenge in forecasting electricity price is when dealing with non-stationary and high volatile price series. Some of the factors influencing this volatility are load behavior, weather, fuel price and transaction of import and export due to long term contract. This paper proposes the use of Least Square Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) with Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimization technique to predict daily electricity prices in Ontario. The selection of input data and LSSVM’s parameter held by GA are proven to improve accuracy as well as efficiency of prediction. A comparative study of proposed approach with other techniques and previous research was conducted in term of forecast accuracy, where the results indicate that (1) the LSSVM with GA outperforms other methods of LSSVM and Neural Network (NN), (2) the optimization algorithm of GA gives better accuracy than Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and cross validation. However, future study should emphasize on improving forecast accuracy during spike event since Ontario power market is reported as among the most volatile market worldwide.