Combining Probabilistic Load Forecasts

Probabilistic load forecasts provide comprehensive information about future load uncertainties. In recent years, many methodologies and techniques have been proposed for probabilistic load forecasting. Forecast combination, a widely recognized best practice in point forecasting literature, has never been formally adopted to combine probabilistic load forecasts. This paper proposes a constrained quantile regression averaging (CQRA) method to create an improved ensemble from several individual probabilistic forecasts. We formulate the CQRA parameter estimation problem as a linear program with the objective of minimizing the pinball loss, with the constraints that the parameters are nonnegative and summing up to one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using two publicly available datasets, the ISO New England data and Irish smart meter data. Comparing with the best individual probabilistic forecast, the ensemble can reduce the pinball score by 4.39% on average. The proposed ensemble also demonstrates superior performance over nine other benchmark ensembles.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Smart Gri

Combining Multiple Time Series Models Through A Robust Weighted Mechanism

Improvement of time series forecasting accuracy through combining multiple models is an important as well as a dynamic area of research. As a result, various forecasts combination methods have been developed in literature. However, most of them are based on simple linear ensemble strategies and hence ignore the possible relationships between two or more participating models. In this paper, we propose a robust weighted nonlinear ensemble technique which considers the individual forecasts from different models as well as the correlations among them while combining. The proposed ensemble is constructed using three well-known forecasting models and is tested for three real-world time series. A comparison is made among the proposed scheme and three other widely used linear combination methods, in terms of the obtained forecast errors. This comparison shows that our ensemble scheme provides significantly lower forecast errors than each individual model as well as each of the four linear combination methods.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, conferenc

Fast Fourier Transform Ensemble Kalman Filter with Application to a Coupled Atmosphere-Wildland Fire Model

We propose a new type of the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF), which uses the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for covariance estimation from a very small ensemble with automatic tapering, and for a fast computation of the analysis ensemble by convolution, avoiding the need to solve a sparse system with the tapered matrix. The FFT EnKF is combined with the morphing EnKF to enable the correction of position errors, in addition to amplitude errors, and demonstrated on WRF-Fire, the Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) model coupled with a fire spread model implemented by the level set method.Comment: 8 page