Improving short term load forecast accuracy via combining sister forecasts

Although combining forecasts is well-known to be an effective approach to improving forecast accuracy, the literature and case studies on combining load forecasts are very limited. In this paper, we investigate the performance of combining so-called sister load forecasts with eight methods: three variants of arithmetic averaging, four regression based and one performance based method. Through comprehensive analysis of two case studies developed from public data (Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014 and ISO New England), we demonstrate that combing sister forecasts outperforms the benchmark methods significantly in terms of forecasting accuracy measured by Mean Absolute Percentage Error. With the power to improve accuracy of individual forecasts and the advantage of easy generation, combining sister load forecasts has a high academic and practical value for researchers and practitioners.