FORECASTING OF TURKEY’S ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION USING SUPPORT VECTOR REGRESSION TRAINED WITH GENETIC ALGORITHM

Energy is a very important factor in terms of sustaining the economic development for developing and industrialized countries. Electricity is one of the most important forms of energy for industrialization and improvement of living standards. The estimation and modeling of electricity consumption has a special importance in Turkey which is a foreign-dependent country in energy. In this study a forecasting application is made by using Turkey’s electricity consumption, population, import, export and gross domestic product between 1975-2014, employing support vector regression method. By using genetic algorithm to choose the parameters of SVR, the method outperforms significantly.