Improved short-term load forecasting using bagged neural networks

In this paper we present improved short-term load forecasting using bagged neural networks (BNNs). The BNNs consist of creating multiple sets of data by sampling randomly with replacement, training a neural network on each data set, and averaging the results obtained from each trained neural network. The bagging process reduces estimation errors and variation range of errors compared to using a single neural network for load forecasting. Examples with real data show the effectiveness of our proposed techniques by demonstrating that using BNNs can reduce load forecasting errors, compared to various existing techniques. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.