RESIDENTIAL ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION FORECASTING USING A GEOMETRIC COMBINATION APPROACH

The forecasting of electricity consumption and demand plays a pivotal role in electric power systems planning. This paper proposes the combination of forecasts from two approaches with the aim of improving the forecasting accuracy, in order to make the best use of the installed transmission and generating capacity. In the first approach, the consumption time series is decomposed by wavelet analysis and a Box-Jenkins model is fitted to each wavelet component, following which the individual components forecasts are added to compute the total consumption forecast. The alternative approach, uses the Singular Spectrum Analysis technique to model the consumption time series in order to shrink the noise level. Thereafter, the Box-Jenkins model is used to forecast the filtered time series, producing a second forecast for the consumption series. Eventually, the two forecasts are combined geometrically in order to minimize the mean square error. The proposed methodology is illustrated by a computational experiment with the time series of residential consumption of electricity in Brazil.