Monthly Electric Energy Consumption Forecasting Using Multiwindow Moving Average and Hybrid Growth Models

Monthly electric energy consumption forecasting is important for electricity production planning and electric power engineering decision making. Multiwindow moving average algorithm is proposed to decompose the monthly electric energy consumption time series into several periodic waves and a long-term approximately exponential increasing trend. Radial basis function (RBF) artificial neural network (ANN) models are used to forecast the extracted periodic waves. A novel hybrid growth model, which includes a constant term, a linear term, and an exponential term, is proposed to forecast the extracted increasing trend. The forecasting results of the monthly electric energy consumption can be obtained by adding the forecasting values of each model. To test the performance by comparison, the proposed and other three models are used to forecast China's monthly electric energy consumption from January 2011 to December 2012. Results show that the proposed model exhibited the best performance in terms of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and maximal absolute percentage error (MaxAPE).