English

Ensembling methods for countrywide short term forecasting of gas demand

Machine Learning 2021-01-26 v4 Machine Learning

Abstract

Gas demand is made of three components: Residential, Industrial, and Thermoelectric Gas Demand. Herein, the one-day-ahead prediction of each component is studied, using Italian data as a case study. Statistical properties and relationships with temperature are discussed, as a preliminary step for an effective feature selection. Nine "base forecasters" are implemented and compared: Ridge Regression, Gaussian Processes, Nearest Neighbours, Artificial Neural Networks, Torus Model, LASSO, Elastic Net, Random Forest, and Support Vector Regression (SVR). Based on them, four ensemble predictors are crafted: simple average, weighted average, subset average, and SVR aggregation. We found that ensemble predictors perform consistently better than base ones. Moreover, our models outperformed Transmission System Operator (TSO) predictions in a two-year out-of-sample validation. Such results suggest that combining predictors may lead to significant performance improvements in gas demand forecasting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.00097,
  title  = {Ensembling methods for countrywide short term forecasting of gas demand},
  author = {Emanuele Fabbiani and Andrea Marziali and Giuseppe De Nicolao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.00097},
  year   = {2021}
}