Short-Term Load Forecasting Using Informative Vector Machine

In this paper, a novel method is proposed for short-term load forecasting, which is one of the important tasks in power system operation and planning. The load behavior is so complicated that it is hard to predict the load. The deregulated power market is faced with the new problem of an increase in the degree of uncertainty. Thus, power system operators are concerned with the significant level of load forecasting. Namely, probabilistic load forecasting is required to smooth power system operation and planning. In this paper, an IVM (Informative Vector Machine) based method is proposed for short-term load forecasting. IVM is one of the kernel machine techniques that are derived from an SVM (Support Vector Machine). The Gaussian process (GP) satisfies the requirements that the prediction results are expressed as a distribution rather than as points. However, it is inclined to be overtrained for noise due to the basis function with N-2 elements for N data. To overcome this problem, this paper makes use of IVM that selects necessary data for the model approximation with a posteriori distribution of entropy. That has a useful function to suppress the excess training. The proposed method is tested using real data for short-term load forecasting. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 166(2): 23-31, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.20693