Forecasting Short-term Electricity Demand in Residential Sector Based on Support Vector Regression and Fuzzy-rough Feature Selection with Particle Swarm Optimization

The aim of this study is to provide a precise model for one-month-ahead forecast of electricity demand in residential sector. In this study, a total of 20 influential variables are taken into account including monthly electricity consumption, 14 weather variables, and 5 social variables. Based on support vector regression and fuzzy-rough feature selection with particle swarm optimization algorithms, the proposed method established a model with variables that relate to the forecast without ignoring some of these variables one may inevitably lead to forecasting errors. The proposed forecasting model was validated using historical data from South Korea. Its time period was from January 1991 to December 2012. The first 240 months were used for training and the remaining 24 for testing. The performance was evaluated using MAPE, MAE, RMSE, MBE, and UPA values. Furthermore, it was compared with that obtained from the artificial neural network, auto-regressive integrated moving average, multiple linear regression models, and the methods proposed in the previous studies, and found superior for every performance measure considered in this study. The proposed method has an advantage over the previous methods because it automatically determines appropriate and necessary variables for a reliable forecast. It is expected that the proposed model can contribute to more accurate forecasting of short-term electricity demand in residential sector. The ability to accurately forecast short-term electricity demand can assist power system operators and market participants in ensuring sustainable electricity planning decisions and secure electricity supply to the consumers. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.