Prediction interval estimation of electricity prices using PSO-tuned support vector machines

Uncertainty of the electricity prices makes the task of accurate forecasting quite difficult for the electricity market participants. Prediction intervals (PIs) are statistical tools which quantify the uncertainty related to forecasts by estimating the ranges of the future electricity prices. Traditional approaches based on neural networks (NNs) generate PIs at the cost of high computational burden and doubtful assumptions about data distributions. In this work, we propose a novel technique that is not plagued with the above limitations and it generates high-quality PIs in a short time. The proposed method directly generates the lower and upper bounds of the future electricity prices using support vector machines (SVM). Optimal model parameters are obtained by the minimization of a modified PI-based objective function using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. The efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated using data from Ontario, Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland (PJM) interconnection day-ahead and real-time markets.