Background Short-term load forecasting is an important issue that has been widely explored and examined with respect to the operation of power systems and commercial transactions in electricity markets. Of the existing forecasting models, support vector regression (SVR) has attracted much attention. While model selection, including feature selection and parameter optimization, plays an important role in short-term load forecasting using SVR, most previous studies have considered feature selection and parameter optimization as two separate tasks, which is detrimental to prediction performance. Objective By evolving feature selection and parameter optimization simultaneously, the main aims of this study are to make practitioners aware of the benefits of applying unified model selection in STLF using SVR and to provide one solution for model selection in the framework of memetic algorithm (MA). Methods This study proposes a comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization (CLPSO)-based memetic algorithm (CLPSO-MA) that evolves feature selection and parameter optimization simultaneously. In the proposed CLPSO-MA algorithm, CLPSO is applied to explore the solution space, while a problem-specific local search is proposed for conducting individual learning, thereby enhancing the exploitation of CLPSO. Results Compared with other well-established counterparts, benefits of the proposed unified model selection problem and the proposed CLPSO-MA for model selection are verified using two real-world electricity load datasets, which indicates the SVR equipped with CLPSO-MA can be a promising alternative for short-term load forecasting. 
Comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization based memetic algorithm for model selection in short-term load forecasting using support vector regression