Artificial Neural Networks and regression approaches comparison for forecasting Iran´s annual electricity load

Electrical load forecasting is one of the important concerns of power systems and has been studied from different views. Electrical load forecast might be performed over different time intervals of short, medium and long term. Various techniques have been proposed for short term, medium term or long term load forecasting. In this study we employ artificial neural networks (ANN) and regression (linear and log-linear) approaches for annual electricity load forecasting. This study presents a model that is affected by two economical parameters which are Real-GDP and Population. Using Real-GDP instead of nominal-GDP can provide more accuracy because the effects of inflation are considered in the structure of such model and this will cause the results to be more reliable. To improve forecasting accuracy of the model we apply data preprocessing techniques. Forecasting capability of each approach is evaluated by calculating three separate statistical evaluations of the root mean square error (RMSE), the mean absolute error (MAE), and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). All evaluations indicate that the accuracy of ANN which is trained with preprocessed data is remarkably better than the other two conventional approaches.