Forecasting performance of time series models on electricity spot markets: a quasi-meta-analysis

Abstract

Purpose Empirical publications on the time series modeling and forecasting of electricity prices vary widely regarding the conditions, and the findings make it difficult to generalize results. Against this background, it is surprising that there is a lack of statistics-based literature reviews on the forecasting performance when comparing different models. The purpose of the present study is to fill this gap. Design/methodology/approach The authors conduct a comprehensive literature analysis from 2000 to 2015, covering 86 empirical studies on the time series modeling and forecasting of electricity spot prices. Various statistics are presented to characterize the empirical literature on electricity spot price modeling, and the forecasting performance of several model types and modifications is analyzed. The key issue of this study is to offer a comparison between different model types and modeling conditions regarding their forecasting performance, which is referred to as a quasi-meta-analysis, i.e. the analysis of analyses to achieve more general findings independent of the circumstances of single studies. Findings The authors find evidence that generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity models outperform their autoregressive–moving-average counterparts and that the consideration of explanatory variables improves forecasts. Originality/value To the best knowledge of the authors, this paper is the first to apply the methodology of meta-analyses in a literature review of the empirical forecasting literature on electricity spot markets.