Partially Linear Component Support Vector Machine for Primary Energy Consumption Forecasting of the Electric Power Sector in the United States

Energy forecasting based on univariate time series has long been a challenge in energy engineering and has become one of the most popular tasks in data analytics. In order to take advantage of the characteristics of observed data, a partially linear model is proposed based on principal component analysis and support vector machine methods. The principal linear components of the input with lower dimensions are used as the linear part, while the nonlinear part is expressed by the kernel function. The primal-dual method is used to construct the convex optimization problem for the proposed model, and the sequential minimization optimization algorithm is used to train the model with global convergence. The univariate forecasting scheme is designed to forecast the primary energy consumption of the electric power sector of the United States using real-world data sets ranging from January 1973 to January 2020, and the model is compared with eight commonly used machine learning models as well as the linear auto-regressive model. Comprehensive comparisons with multiple evaluation criteria (including 19 metrics) show that the proposed model outperforms all other models in all scenarios of mid-/long-term forecasting, indicating its high potential in primary energy consumption forecasting.