Electricity consumer characterization in liberalized market based on data mining techniques

Electricity market liberalization gives the opportunity to customers to choice their electricity supplier. This new circumstance creates an environment where several retail companies compete for the electricity supply to end users. More exact knowledge of the consumer behavior is thus essential for designing specific pricing strategy and tariff options, in which the tariff rates consider the consumption patterns from various types of customers. One of the main aims of this paper is to give a detailed comparison of classical multivariate methods with computational intelligent techniques. Based on the obtained results methods are developed in order to support the traders in electricity pricing.