Forecasting Electricity Prices: Autoregressive Hybrid Nearest Neighbors (ARHNN) Method

The ongoing reshape of electricity markets has significantly stimulated electricity trading. Limitations in storing electricity as well as on-the-fly changes in demand and supply dynamics, have led price forecasts to be a fundamental aspect of traders’ economic stability and growth. In this perspective, there is a broad literature that focuses on developing methods and techniques to forecast electricity prices. In this paper, we develop a new hybrid method, called ARHNN, for electricity price forecasting (EPF) in day-ahead markets. A well performing autoregressive model, with exogenous variables, is the main forecasting instrument in our method. Contrarily to the traditional statistical approaches, in which the calibration sample consists of the most recent and successive observations, we employ the k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) instance-based learning algorithm and we select the calibration sample based on a similarity (distance) measure over a subset of the autoregressive model’s variables. The optimal levels of the k-NN parameter are identified during the validation period in a way that the forecasting error is minimized. We apply our method in the EPEX SPOT market in Germany. The results reveal a significant improvement in accuracy compared to commonly used approaches.