A TWO STAGE MODEL FOR DAY-AHEAD ELECTRICITY PRICE FORECASTING: INTEGRATING EMPIRICAL MODE DECOMPOSITION AND CATBOOST ALGORITHM

Electricity price forecasting is crucial for the secure and cost-effective operation of electrical power systems. However, the uncertain and volatile nature of electricity prices makes the electricity price forecasting process more challenging. In this study, a two-stage forecasting model was proposed in order to accurately predict day-ahead electricity prices. Historical natural gas prices, electricity load forecasts, and historical electricity price values were used as the forecasting model inputs. The historical electricity and natural gas price data were decomposed in the first stage to extract more deep features. The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm was employed for the efficient decomposition process. In the second stage, the categorical boosting (CatBoost) algorithm was proposed to forecast day-ahead electricity prices accurately. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed forecasting model, a case study was conducted using the dataset from the Turkish electricity market. The proposed model results were compared with benchmark machine learning algorithms. The results of this study indicated that the proposed model outperformed the benchmark models with the lowest root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and correlation coefficient (R) values of 8.3282%, 5.2210%, 6.9675%, and 86.2256%, respectively.