Genetic Optimal Regression of Relevance Vector Machines for Electricity Pricing Signal Forecasting in Smart Grids

Price-directed demand in smart grids operating within deregulated electricity markets calls for real-time forecasting of the price of electricity for the purpose of scheduling demand at the nodal level (e.g., appliances, machines, and devices) in a way that minimizes energy cost to the consumer. In this paper, a novel hybrid methodology for electricity price forecasting is introduced and applied on a set of real-world historical data taken from the New England area. The proposed approach is implemented in two steps. In the first step, a set of relevance vector machines (RVMs) is adopted, where each RVM is used for individual ahead-of-time price prediction. In the second step, individual predictions are aggregated to formulate a linear regression ensemble, whose coefficients are obtained as the solution of a single objective optimization problem. Thus, an optimal solution to the problem is found by employing the micro-genetic algorithm and the optimized ensemble is employed for computing the final price forecast. The performance of the proposed methodology is compared with performance of autoregressive-moving-average and naïve forecasting methods, as well as to that taken from each individual RVM. Results clearly demonstrate the superiority of the hybrid methodology over the other tested methods with regard to mean absolute error for electricity signal pricing forecasting.