Forecasting peak electric load: Robust support vector regression with smooth nonconvex ϵ‐insensitive loss

Peak power load forecasting is a key part of the commercial operation of the energy industry. Although various load forecasting methods and technologies have been put forward and tested in practice, the growing subject of tolerance for abnormal accidents is to develop robust peak load forecasting models. In this paper, we propose a robust smooth non‐convex support vector regression method, which improves the robustness of the model by adjusting adaptive control loss values and adaptive robust parameters and by reducing the negative impact of outliers or noise on the decision function. A concave‐convex programming algorithm is used to solve the non‐convexity of the optimization problem. Good results are obtained in both linear regression model and nonlinear regression model and two real data sets. An experiment is carried out in a power company in Jiangxi Province, China, to evaluate the performance of the robust smooth non‐convex support vector regression model. The results show that the proposed method is superior to support vector regression and generalized quadratic non‐convex support vector regression in robustness and generalization ability.