Automatic Kernel Based Models for Short Term Load Forecasting

The application of support vector machines to forecasting problems is becoming popular, lately. Several comparisons between neural networks trained with error backpropagation and support vector machines have shown advantage for the latter in different domains of application. However, some difficulties still deteriorate the performance of the support vector machines. The main one is related to the setting of the hyperparameters involved in their training. Techniques based on meta-heuristics have been employed to determine appropriate values for those hyperparameters. However, because of the high nonconvexity of this estimation problem, which makes the search for a good solution very hard, an approach based on Bayesian inference, called relevance vector machine, has been proposed more recently. The present paper aims at investigating the suitability of this new approach to the short term load forecasting problem.