Combining Probability Density Forecasts for Power Electrical Loads

Abstract

Researchers have proposed various probabilistic load forecasting models in the form of quantiles, densities, or intervals to describe the uncertainties of future energy demand. Density forecasts can provide more uncertainty information than can be expressed by just the quantile and interval. However, the combining method for density forecasts is seldom investigated. This paper proposes a novel and easily implemented approach to combine density probabilistic load forecasts to further improve the performance of the final probabilistic forecasts. The combination problem is formulated as an optimization problem to minimize the continuous ranked probability score of the combined model by searching the weights of different individual methods. Under the Gaussian mixture distribution assumption of the density forecasts, the problem is cast to a linearly constrained quadratic programming problem and can be solved efficiently. Case studies on the electric load datasets of eight areas verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.