The Investigation of Monthly/Seasonal Data Clustering Impact on Short-Term Electricity Price Forecasting Accuracy: Ontario Province Case Study

The transformation of the electricity market structure from a monopoly model to a competitive market has caused electricity to be exchanged like a commercial commodity in the electricity market. The electricity price participants should forecast the price in different horizons to make an optimal offer as a buyer or a seller. Therefore, accurate electricity price prediction is very important for market participants. This paper investigates the monthly/seasonal data clustering impact on price forecasting. To this end, after clustering the data, the effective parameters in the electricity price forecasting problem are selected using a grey correlation analysis method and the parameters with a low degree of correlation are removed. At the end, the long short-term memory neural network has been implemented to predict the electricity price for the next day. The proposed method is implemented on Ontario-Canada data and the prediction results are compared in three modes, including non-clustering, seasonal, and monthly clustering. The studies show that the prediction error in the monthly clustering mode has decreased compared to the non-clustering and seasonal clustering modes in two different values of the correlation coefficient, 0.5 and 0.6.