A small-sample adaptive hybrid model for annual electricity consumption forecasting

Annual electricity consumption forecasting is one of the important foundations of power system planning. Considering that the long-term electricity consumption curves of developing countries usually present approximately exponential growth trends and linear and accelerated growth rate trends may also appear in certain periods, this paper first proposes a small-sample adaptive hybrid model (AHM) to extrapolate the above curves. The iterative trend extrapolation equation of the proposed model can simulate the linear, exponential, and steep trends adaptively at the same time. To estimate the equation parameters using small samples, the partial least squares (PLS) and iteration starting point optimization algorithms are suggested. To evaluate forecasting performance, the artificial neural network (ANN), grey model (GM), and AHM are used to forecast electricity consumption in China from 1991 to 2014, and then the results of these models are compared. Analysis of the forecasting results shows that the AHM can overcome stochastic changes and respond quickly to changes in the main electricity consumption trend because of its specialized equation structure. Overall error analysis indicators also show that AHM often obtains more precise forecasting results than the other two models.