Prediction of electric load using Kohonen maps - Application to the Polish electricity consumption

The problem of electrical load forecasting presents some particularities, compared to the generic problem of time-series prediction. One of these particularities is that several values (corresponding to one day of consumption) are usually expected as the result of the prediction. In this paper, we propose an original method dividing the problem into three parts: prediction of the daily mean, of the daily standard deviation and of the normalized daily profile. For the mean and the standard deviation, radial function networks are used as nonlinear approximators. For the normalized profile, a method based on Kohonen maps is proposed. This method is applied to the prediction of the Polish electricity consumption.