Application of semi parametric modelling to times series forecasting: case of the electricity consumption

Reseau de Transport d'Electricite (RTE), in charge of operating the French electric transportation grid, needs an accurate forecast of the power consumption in order to operate it correctly. The forecasts used everyday result from a model combining a nonlinear parametric regression and a SARIMA model. In order to obtain an adaptive forecasting model, nonparametric forecasting methods have already been tested without real success. In particular, it is known that a nonparametric predictor behaves badly with a great number of explanatory variables, what is commonly called the curse of dimensionality. Recently, semi parametric methods which improve the pure nonparametric approach have been proposed to estimate a regression function. Based on the concept of 'dimension reduction', one those methods (called MAVE : Moving Average -conditional- Variance Estimate) can apply to time series. We study empirically its effectiveness to predict the future values of an autoregressive time series. We then adapt this method, from a practical point of view, to forecast power consumption. We propose a partially linear semi parametric model, based on the MAVE method, which allows to take into account simultaneously the autoregressive aspect of the problem and the exogenous variables. The proposed estimation procedure is practically efficient. (author)