Electricity price forecasting using quantile regression averaging with nonconvex regularization

Electricity price forecasting (EPF) is an emergent research domain that focuses on forecasting the future electricity market price both deterministically and probabilistically. EPF has attracted enormous interest from both practitioners and scholars since the deregulation of the power market and wide applications of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy. However, forecasting the electricity price accurately and efficiently is an extremely challenging task because of its high volatility, randomness, and fluctuation. Although quantile regression averaging (QRA) has been demonstrated to be efficacious in probabilistic EPF since the global energy forecasting competition in 2014 (GEFCom2014), it is sensitive to nuisance variables especially when the number of variables is large. The forecasting accuracy will be negatively affected by these nuisance variables. To address these challenges, this study investigates a nonconvex regularized QRA in probabilistic forecasting. Two types of nonconvex regularized QRA select the important inputs obtained from point forecasting to obtain more accurate forecasting outcomes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EPF model, two real datasets from the European power market are considered.