OrderFusion: Encoding Orderbook for End-to-End Probabilistic Intraday Electricity Price Forecasting

Probabilistic intraday electricity price forecasting is becoming increasingly important with the growth of renewable generation and the rise in demand-side engagement. Their uncertainties have increased the trading risks closer to delivery and the subsequent imbalance settlement costs. As a consequence, intraday trading has emerged to mitigate these risks. Unlike auction markets, intraday trading in many jurisdictions is characterized by the continuous posting of buy and sell orders on power exchange platforms. This dynamic orderbook microstructure of price formation presents special challenges for price forecasting. Conventional methods represent the orderbook via domain features aggregated from buy and sell trades, or by treating it as a multivariate time series, but such representations neglect the full buy-sell interaction structure of the orderbook. This research therefore develops a new order fusion methodology, which is an end-to-end and parameter-efficient probabilistic forecasting model that learns a full interaction-aware representation of the buy-sell dynamics. Furthermore, as quantile crossing is often a problem in probabilistic forecasting, this approach hierarchically estimates the quantiles with non-crossing constraints. Extensive experiments on the market price indices across high-liquidity (German) and low-liquidity (Austrian) markets demonstrate consistent improvements over conventional baselines, and ablation studies highlight the contributions of the main modeling components. The methodology is available at: https://runyao-yu.github.io/OrderFusion/.