Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis for clustering structures of electricity price periods

• Some multifractal parameters of electricity price signals are calculated by MF-DFA.
• Some trends in each signal are filtering by Fourier detrended fluctuation function.
• Some multi-dimensional spaces are constructed for clustering of price signals.
• Clustering result indicates that the discriminant accuracies are satisfactory.

A new model is proposed to investigate the structure of electricity price in different time periods. A popular method — the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) method is employed to analyze the features achieved from three types of electricity price data after filtering some trends by Fourier detrended fluctuation function. Twelve multifractal parameters are calculated and selected as the characteristic indicators for comparison. Moreover, the minimum number of indicators is determined so that the discriminant accuracy reaches maximum based on Fisher’s linear discriminant algorithm (Fisher’s LDA) for each time period. These indicators form a multi-dimensional space, in which each point represents a price time series. This allows us to cluster the three price time periods, namely, the low price time periods, the average price time periods and the peak price time periods. Fisher’s LDA is employed to evaluate the discriminant accuracy on these three kinds of time periods. Our analysis is then applied to the data in California1999–2000 and PJM2001–2002 electricity markets to demonstrate the applicability of our methods.