A new cascade NN based method to short-term load forecast in deregulated electricity market

•We are proposed a new hybrid cascaded NN based method and WT to short-term load forecast in deregulated electricity market.•An efficient preprocessor consist of normalization and shuffling of signals is presented.•In order to select the best inputs, a two-stage feature selection is presented.•A new cascaded structure consist of three cascaded NNs is used as forecaster. Short-term load forecasting (STLF) is a major discussion in efficient operation of power systems. The electricity load is a nonlinear signal with time dependent behavior. The area of electricity load forecasting has still essential need for more accurate and stable load forecast algorithm. To improve the accuracy of prediction, a new hybrid forecast strategy based on cascaded neural network is proposed for STLF. This method is consists of wavelet transform, an intelligent two-stage feature selection, and cascaded neural network. The feature selection is used to remove the irrelevant and redundant inputs. The forecast engine is composed of three cascaded neural network (CNN) structure. This cascaded structure can be efficiently extract input/output mapping function of the nonlinear electricity load data. Adjustable parameters of the intelligent feature selection and CNN is fine-tuned by a kind of cross-validation technique. The proposed STLF is tested on PJM and New York electricity markets. It is concluded from the result, the proposed algorithm is a robust forecast method.