Fuzzy interaction regression for short term load forecasting

Electric load forecasting is a fundamental business process and well-established analytical problem in the utility industry. Due to various characteristics of electricity demand series and the business needs, electric load forecasting is a classical textbook example and popular application field in the forecasting community. During the past 30 plus years, many statistical and artificial intelligence techniques have been applied to short term load forecasting (STLF) with varying degrees of success. Although fuzzy regression has been tried for STLF for about a decade, most research work is still focused at the theoretical level, leaving little value for practical applications. A primary reason is that inadequate attention has been paid to the improvement of the underlying linear model. This application-oriented paper proposes a fuzzy interaction regression approach to STLF. Through comparisons to three models (two fuzzy regression models and one multiple linear regression model) without interaction effects, the proposed approach shows superior performance over its counterparts. This paper also offers critical comments to a notable but questionable paper in this field. Finally, tips for practicing forecasting using fuzzy regression are discussed.