A combined model based on SSA, neural networks, and LSSVM for short-term electric load and price forecasting

Electricity, a kind of clean energy, has been widely used in people's production and daily life. However, it is very difficult to estimate the electricity energy production in advance and store the rest of the electric energy due to the climate, environment, population and other factors. Based on data preprocessing and artificial intelligence optimization algorithm, this paper introduces a combined forecasting method. The proposed method contains six individual methods, and each individual method has its own usage. Singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is adopted to reduce noise from the original data; three individual forecasting methods, Jordan neural network, the echo state network, least squares support vector machine, are applied to obtain the intermediate forecasting results; two optimization algorithms, particle swarm optimization and simulated annealing, are used to optimize the parameters of the combined model. This paper not only validates the superiority of the combined model compared to the single predictive model through the simulation experiments of power load data and electricity price data. The mean absolute percent error (MAPE) of the combined power load and electricity price forecast results are 1.14% and 7.58%, respectively, which are higher than the MAPE error of the corresponding single models prediction results. It has also been verified that the process of eliminating noise by the SSA plays a positive role in the accuracy of the combined forecasting model. In addition, two series of experiments on the power load data lead to two very interesting conclusions. One of the conclusions is that as the size of the test data increases, the prediction accuracy of the model decreases; the other is that the predicted result calculated through the optimized combined weight is better than the combined result calculated using the average weight, and the average weight is used. Weighted combination does not improve the prediction accuracy of a single model.