Nonparametric modeling and forecasting electricity demand: an empirical study

This paper uses half-hourly electricity demand data in South Australia as an empirical study of nonparametric modeling and forecasting methods for prediction from half-hour ahead to one year ahead. A notable feature of the univariate time series of electricity demand is the presence of both intraweek and intraday seasonalities. An intraday seasonal cycle is apparent from the similarity of the demand from one day to the next, and an intraweek seasonal cycle is evident from comparing the demand on the corresponding day of adjacent weeks. There is a strong appeal in using forecasting methods that are able to capture both seasonalities. In this paper, the forecasting methods slice a seasonal univariate time series into a time series of curves. The forecasting methods reduce the dimensionality by applying functional principal component analysis to the observed data, and then utilize an univariate time series forecasting method and functional principal component regression techniques. When data points in the most recent curve are sequentially observed, updating methods can improve the point and interval forecast accuracy. We also revisit a nonparametric approach to construct prediction intervals of updated forecasts, and evaluate the interval forecast accuracy.Functional principal component analysis; functional time series; multivariate time series, ordinary least squares, penalized least squares; ridge regression; seasonal time series

Nonparametric time series forecasting with dynamic updating

We present a nonparametric method to forecast a seasonal univariate time series, and propose four dynamic updating methods to improve point forecast accuracy. Our methods consider a seasonal univariate time series as a functional time series. We propose first to reduce the dimensionality by applying functional principal component analysis to the historical observations, and then to use univariate time series forecasting and functional principal component regression techniques. When data in the most recent year are partially observed, we improve point forecast accuracy using dynamic updating methods. We also introduce a nonparametric approach to construct prediction intervals of updated forecasts, and compare the empirical coverage probability with an existing parametric method. Our approaches are data-driven and computationally fast, and hence they are feasible to be applied in real time high frequency dynamic updating. The methods are demonstrated using monthly sea surface temperatures from 1950 to 2008.Functional time series, Functional principal component analysis, Ordinary least squares, Penalized least squares, Ridge regression, Sea surface temperatures, Seasonal time series.