Temperature anomaly detection for electric load forecasting

Since temperature variables are used in many load forecasting models, the quality of historical temperature data is crucial to the forecast accuracy. The raw data collected by local weather stations and archived by government agencies often include many missing values and incorrect readings, and thus cannot be used directly by load forecasters. As a result, many power companies today purchase data from commercial weather service vendors. Such quality-controlled data may still have many defects, but many load forecasters have been using them in full faith. This paper proposes a novel temperature anomaly detection methodology that makes use of the local load information collected by power companies. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through two public datasets: one from the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2014 and the other from ISO New England. The results show that the accuracy of the final load forecasts can be enhanced by removing the detected observations from the original input data.