Distributional modeling and short-term forecasting of electricity prices by Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape

In the context of the liberalized and deregulated electricity markets, price forecasting has become increasingly important for energy company's plans and market strategies. Within the class of the time series models that are used to perform price forecasting, the subclasses of methods based on stochastic time series and causal models commonly provide point forecasts, whereas the corresponding uncertainty is quantified by approximate or simulation-based confidence intervals. Aiming to improve the uncertainty assessment, this study introduces the Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS) to model the dynamically varying distribution of prices. The GAMLSS allow fitting a variety of distributions whose parameters change according to covariates via a number of linear and nonlinear relationships. In this way, price periodicities, trends and abrupt changes characterizing both the position parameter (linked to the expected value of prices), and the scale and shape parameters (related to price volatility, skewness, and kurtosis) can be explicitly incorporated in the model setup. Relying on the past behavior of the prices and exogenous variables, the GAMLSS enable the short-term (one-day ahead) forecast of the entire distribution of prices. The approach was tested on two datasets from the widely studied California Power Exchange (CalPX) market, and the less mature Italian Power Exchange (IPEX). CalPX data allow comparing the GAMLSS forecasting performance with published results obtained by different models. The study points out that the GAMLSS framework can be a flexible alternative to several linear and nonlinear stochastic models.

Research Highlights► Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS) are used to model electricity prices' time series. ► GAMLSS provide the entire dynamicaly varying distribution function of prices resorting to a suitable set of covariates that drive the instantaneous values of the parameters. ► An appropriate choice of the predictor variables allows the definition of reliable and realistic point and interval short-term forecasts for electricity prices. ► The application to California and Italian markets' data points out the flexibility and potentialities of the GAMLSS framework compared to some classical time series models.