IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2508.11372.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Stealing Accuracy: Predicting Day-ahead Electricity Prices with Temporal Hierarchy Forecasting (THieF)

Author

Listed:
  • Arkadiusz Lipiecki
  • Kaja Bilinska
  • Nicolaos Kourentzes
  • Rafal Weron

Abstract

We introduce the concept of temporal hierarchy forecasting (THieF) in predicting day-ahead electricity prices and show that reconciling forecasts for hourly products, 2- to 12-hour blocks, and baseload contracts significantly (up to 13%) improves accuracy at all levels. These results remain consistent throughout a challenging 4-year test period (2021-2024) in the German power market and across model architectures, including linear regression, a shallow neural network, gradient boosting, and a state-of-the-art transformer. Given that (i) trading of block products is becoming more common and (ii) the computational cost of reconciliation is comparable to that of predicting hourly prices alone, we recommend using it in daily forecasting practice.

Suggested Citation

  • Arkadiusz Lipiecki & Kaja Bilinska & Nicolaos Kourentzes & Rafal Weron, 2025. "Stealing Accuracy: Predicting Day-ahead Electricity Prices with Temporal Hierarchy Forecasting (THieF)," Papers 2508.11372, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2508.11372
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11372
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kourentzes, Nikolaos & Petropoulos, Fotios & Trapero, Juan R., 2014. "Improving forecasting by estimating time series structural components across multiple frequencies," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 291-302.
    2. Serafin, Tomasz & Weron, Rafał, 2025. "Loss functions in regression models: Impact on profits and risk in day-ahead electricity trading," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Barrow, Devon & Kourentzes, Nikolaos, 2018. "The impact of special days in call arrivals forecasting: A neural network approach to modelling special days," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 264(3), pages 967-977.
    2. Mamingi Nlandu, 2017. "Beauty and Ugliness of Aggregation over Time: A Survey," Review of Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 68(3), pages 205-227, December.
    3. Kourentzes, Nikolaos & Athanasopoulos, George, 2021. "Elucidate structure in intermittent demand series," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 288(1), pages 141-152.
    4. Alexander, Carol & Rauch, Johannes, 2021. "A general property for time aggregation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 291(2), pages 536-548.
    5. Rendon-Sanchez, Juan F. & de Menezes, Lilian M., 2019. "Structural combination of seasonal exponential smoothing forecasts applied to load forecasting," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 275(3), pages 916-924.
    6. Bergmeir, Christoph & Hyndman, Rob J. & Benítez, José M., 2016. "Bagging exponential smoothing methods using STL decomposition and Box–Cox transformation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 303-312.
    7. Prak, Dennis & Teunter, Ruud & Babai, Mohamed Zied & Boylan, John E. & Syntetos, Aris, 2021. "Robust compound Poisson parameter estimation for inventory control," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 104(C).
    8. Chelsey Hill & James Li & Matthew J. Schneider & Martin T. Wells, 2021. "The tensor auto‐regressive model," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(4), pages 636-652, July.
    9. Boylan, John E. & Babai, M. Zied, 2016. "On the performance of overlapping and non-overlapping temporal demand aggregation approaches," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 181(PA), pages 136-144.
    10. Spiliotis, Evangelos & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios & Nikolopoulos, Konstantinos, 2019. "Forecasting with a hybrid method utilizing data smoothing, a variation of the Theta method and shrinkage of seasonal factors," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 209(C), pages 92-102.
    11. Corey Ducharme & Bruno Agard & Martin Trépanier, 2024. "Improving demand forecasting for customers with missing downstream data in intermittent demand supply chains with supervised multivariate clustering," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(5), pages 1661-1681, August.
    12. Kourentzes, Nikolaos & Saayman, Andrea & Jean-Pierre, Philippe & Provenzano, Davide & Sahli, Mondher & Seetaram, Neelu & Volo, Serena, 2021. "Visitor arrivals forecasts amid COVID-19: A perspective from the Africa team," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    13. Theresa Maria Rausch & Tobias Albrecht & Daniel Baier, 2022. "Beyond the beaten paths of forecasting call center arrivals: on the use of dynamic harmonic regression with predictor variables," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 92(4), pages 675-706, May.
    14. Karamaziotis, Panagiotis I. & Raptis, Achilleas & Nikolopoulos, Konstantinos & Litsiou, Konstantia & Assimakopoulos, Vassilis, 2020. "An empirical investigation of water consumption forecasting methods," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 588-606.
    15. Wang, Xiaoqian & Hyndman, Rob J. & Li, Feng & Kang, Yanfei, 2023. "Forecast combinations: An over 50-year review," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(4), pages 1518-1547.
    16. Makridakis, Spyros & Hyndman, Rob J. & Petropoulos, Fotios, 2020. "Forecasting in social settings: The state of the art," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 15-28.
    17. Makridakis, Spyros & Spiliotis, Evangelos & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2020. "The M4 Competition: 100,000 time series and 61 forecasting methods," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 54-74.
    18. Nikolopoulos, Konstantinos, 2021. "We need to talk about intermittent demand forecasting," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 291(2), pages 549-559.
    19. George Athanasopoulos & Nikolaos Kourentzes, 2021. "On the Evaluation of Hierarchical Forecasts," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 10/21, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
    20. Theodorou, Evangelos & Wang, Shengjie & Kang, Yanfei & Spiliotis, Evangelos & Makridakis, Spyros & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios, 2022. "Exploring the representativeness of the M5 competition data," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 1500-1506.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C22 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes
    • C45 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Neural Networks and Related Topics
    • C51 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Construction and Estimation
    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • Q41 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Demand and Supply; Prices
    • Q47 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Energy Forecasting

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2508.11372. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.