Title: Forecasting day-ahead electricity prices in Europe: the importance of considering market integration,
Abstract: Motivated by the increasing integration among electricity markets, in this
paper we propose two different methods to incorporate market integration in
electricity price forecasting and to improve the predictive performance. First,
we propose a deep neural network that considers features from connected markets
to improve the predictive accuracy in a local market. To measure the importance
of these features, we propose a novel feature selection algorithm that, by
using Bayesian optimization and functional analysis of variance, evaluates the
effect of the features on the algorithm performance. In addition, using market
integration, we propose a second model that, by simultaneously predicting
prices from two markets, improves the forecasting accuracy even further. As a
case study, we consider the electricity market in Belgium and the improvements
in forecasting accuracy when using various French electricity features. We show
that the two proposed models lead to improvements that are statistically
significant. Particularly, due to market integration, the predictive accuracy
is improved from 15.7% to 12.5% sMAPE (symmetric mean absolute percentage
error). In addition, we show that the proposed feature selection algorithm is
able to perform a correct assessment, i.e. to discard the irrelevant features.