probabilistic forecast
Achieving Skilled and Reliable Daily Probabilistic Forecasts of Wind Power at Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Timescales over France
Lindas, Eloi, Goude, Yannig, Ciais, Philippe
Accurate and reliable wind power forecasts are crucial for grid stability, balancing supply and demand, and market risk management. Even though short-term weather forecasts have been thoroughly used to provide short-term renewable power predictions, forecasts involving longer prediction horizons still need investigations. Despite the recent progress in subseasonal-to-seasonal weather probabilistic forecasting, their use for wind power prediction usually involves both temporal and spatial aggregation achieve reasonable skill. In this study, we present a forecasting pipeline enabling to transform ECMWF subseasonal-to-seasonal weather forecasts into wind power forecasts for lead times ranging from 1 day to 46 days at daily resolution. This framework also include post-processing of the resulting power ensembles to account for the biases and lack of dispersion of the weather forecasts. We show that our method is able to outperform a climatological baseline by 50 % in terms of both Continuous Ranked Probability Skill Score and Ensemble Mean Squared Error while also providing near perfect calibration of the forecasts for lead times ranging from 15 to 46 days.
Statistical post-processing yields accurate probabilistic forecasts from Artificial Intelligence weather models
Trotta, Belinda, Johnson, Robert, de Burgh-Day, Catherine, Hudson, Debra, Abellan, Esteban, Canvin, James, Kelly, Andrew, Mentiplay, Daniel, Owen, Benjamin, Whelan, Jennifer
Bureau of Meteorology, Australia ABSTRACT: Artificial Intelligence (AI) weather models are now reaching operational-grade performance for some variables, but like traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, they exhibit systematic biases and reliability issues. We test the application of the Bureau of Meteorology's existing statistical post-processing system, IMPROVER, to ECMWF's deterministic Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS), and compare results against post-processed outputs from the ECMWF HRES and ENS models. Without any modification to processing workflows, post-processing yields comparable accuracy improvements for AIFS as for traditional NWP forecasts, in both expected value and probabilistic outputs. We show that blending AIFS with NWP models improves overall forecast skill, even when AIFS alone is not the most accurate component. These findings show that statistical post-processing methods developed for NWP are directly applicable to AI models, enabling national meteorological centres to incorporate AI forecasts into existing workflows in a low-risk, incremental fashion. Notice This Work has been accepted by Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the Version of Record (VoR).
Benchmarking Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting Models on Neural Activity
Lu, Ziyu, Li, Anna J., Ladd, Alexander E., Matveev, Pascha, Deole, Aditya, Shea-Brown, Eric, Kutz, J. Nathan, Steinmetz, Nicholas A.
Neural activity forecasting is central to understanding neural systems and enabling closed-loop control. While deep learning has recently advanced the state-of-the-art in the time series forecasting literature, its application to neural activity forecasting remains limited. To bridge this gap, we systematically evaluated eight probabilistic deep learning models, including two foundation models, that have demonstrated strong performance on general forecasting benchmarks. We compared them against four classical statistical models and two baseline methods on spontaneous neural activity recorded from mouse cortex via widefield imaging. Across prediction horizons, several deep learning models consistently outperformed classical approaches, with the best model producing informative forecasts up to 1.5 seconds into the future. Our findings point toward future control applications and open new avenues for probing the intrinsic temporal structure of neural activity.
Enhanced Renewable Energy Forecasting using Context-Aware Conformal Prediction
Moradi, Alireza, Tanneau, Mathieu, Zandehshahvar, Reza, Van Hentenryck, Pascal
Abstract--Accurate forecasting is critical for reliable power grid operations, particularly as the share of renewable generation, such as wind and solar, continues to grow. Given the inherent uncertainty and variability in renewable generation, probabilistic forecasts have become essential for informed operational decisions. However, such forecasts frequently suffer from calibration issues, potentially degrading decision-making performance. Building on recent advances in Conformal Predictions, this paper introduces a tailored calibration framework that constructs context-aware calibration sets using a novel weighting scheme. The proposed framework improves the quality of probabilistic forecasts at the site and fleet levels, as demonstrated by numerical experiments on large-scale datasets covering several systems in the United States. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves higher forecast reliability and robustness for renewable energy applications compared to existing baselines.
Forecasting Probability Distributions of Financial Returns with Deep Neural Networks
This study evaluates deep neural networks for forecasting probability distributions of financial returns. 1D convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architectures are used to forecast parameters of three probability distributions: Normal, Student's t, and skewed Student's t. Using custom negative log-likelihood loss functions, distribution parameters are optimized directly. The models are tested on six major equity indices (S\&P 500, BOVESPA, DAX, WIG, Nikkei 225, and KOSPI) using probabilistic evaluation metrics including Log Predictive Score (LPS), Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), and Probability Integral Transform (PIT). Results show that deep learning models provide accurate distributional forecasts and perform competitively with classical GARCH models for Value-at-Risk estimation. The LSTM with skewed Student's t distribution performs best across multiple evaluation criteria, capturing both heavy tails and asymmetry in financial returns. This work shows that deep neural networks are viable alternatives to traditional econometric models for financial risk assessment and portfolio management.
EnergyPatchTST: Multi-scale Time Series Transformers with Uncertainty Estimation for Energy Forecasting
Li, Wei, Wang, Zixin, Sun, Qizheng, Gao, Qixiang, Yang, Fenglei
Accurate and reliable energy time series prediction is of great significance for power generation planning and allocation. At present, deep learning time series prediction has become the mainstream method. However, the multi-scale time dynamics and the irregularity of real data lead to the limitations of the existing methods. Therefore, we propose EnergyPatchTST, which is an extension of the Patch Time Series Transformer specially designed for energy forecasting. The main innovations of our method are as follows: (1) multi-scale feature extraction mechanism to capture patterns with different time resolutions; (2) probability prediction framework to estimate uncertainty through Monte Carlo elimination; (3) integration path of future known variables (such as temperature and wind conditions); And (4) Pre-training and Fine-tuning examples to enhance the performance of limited energy data sets. A series of experiments on common energy data sets show that EnergyPatchTST is superior to other commonly used methods, the prediction error is reduced by 7-12%, and reliable uncertainty estimation is provided, which provides an important reference for time series prediction in the energy field.
Probabilistic measures afford fair comparisons of AIWP and NWP model output
Gneiting, Tilmann, Biegert, Tobias, Kraus, Kristof, Walz, Eva-Maria, Jordan, Alexander I., Lerch, Sebastian
We introduce a new measure for fair and meaningful comparisons of single-valued output from artificial intelligence based weather prediction (AIWP) and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, called potential continuous ranked probability score (PC). In a nutshell, we subject the deterministic backbone of physics-based and data-driven models post hoc to the same statistical postprocessing technique, namely, isotonic distributional regression (IDR). Then we find PC as the mean continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) of the postprocessed probabilistic forecasts. The nonnegative PC measure quantifies potential predictive performance and is invariant under strictly increasing transformations of the model output. PC attains its most desirable value of zero if, and only if, the weather outcome Y is a fixed, non-decreasing function of the model output X. The PC measure is recorded in the unit of the outcome, has an upper bound of one half times the mean absolute difference between outcomes, and serves as a proxy for the mean CRPS of real-time, operational probabilistic products. When applied to WeatherBench 2 data, our approach demonstrates that the data-driven GraphCast model outperforms the leading, physics-based European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) high-resolution (HRES) model. Furthermore, the PC measure for the HRES model aligns exceptionally well with the mean CRPS of the operational ECMWF ensemble. Across application domains, our approach affords comparisons of single-valued forecasts in settings where the pre-specification of a loss function -- which is the usual, and principally superior, procedure in forecast contests, administrative, and benchmarks settings -- places competitors on unequal footings.
Probabilistic intraday electricity price forecasting using generative machine learning
Chen, Jieyu, Lerch, Sebastian, Schienle, Melanie, Serafin, Tomasz, Weron, Rafał
The growing importance of intraday electricity trading in Europe calls for improved price forecasting and tailored decision-support tools. In this paper, we propose a novel generative neural network model to generate probabilistic path forecasts for intraday electricity prices and use them to construct effective trading strategies for Germany's continuous-time intraday market. Our method demonstrates competitive performance in terms of statistical evaluation metrics compared to two state-of-the-art statistical benchmark approaches. To further assess its economic value, we consider a realistic fixed-volume trading scenario and propose various strategies for placing market sell orders based on the path forecasts. Among the different trading strategies, the price paths generated by our generative model lead to higher profit gains than the benchmark methods. Our findings highlight the potential of generative machine learning tools in electricity price forecasting and underscore the importance of economic evaluation.
Proper scoring rules for estimation and forecast evaluation
Waghmare, Kartik, Ziegel, Johanna
In recent years, proper scoring rules have emerged as a power ful general approach for estimating probability distributions. In addition to significantly ex panding the range of modeling techniques that can be applied in practice, this has also substantially broadened the conceptual understanding of estimation methods. Originally, proper scoring rules we re conceived in meteorology as summary statistics for describing the performance of probabilisti c forecasts ( Murphy and Winkler, 1984), but they also play an important role in economics as tools for bel ief elicitation ( Schotter and Trevino, 2014). A probabilistic forecast is a probability distribution ove r the space of the possible outcomes of the future event that is stated by the forecaster. The simple st and most popular case of probabilistic forecasts arises when the outcome is binary, so the probabilistic forecast reduces to issuing a predictive probability of success. Brier ( 1950) was the first to consider the problem of devising a scoring rule which could not be "played" by a dishonest fore casting agent. He introduced the quadratic scoring rule and showed that it incentivizes a for ecasting agent to state his most accurate probability estimate when faced with uncertainty.
Diffusion-Based Forecasting for Uncertainty-Aware Model Predictive Control
Zarifis, Stelios, Kordonis, Ioannis, Maragos, Petros
We propose Diffusion-Informed Model Predictive Control (D-I MPC), a generic framework for uncertainty-aware prediction and decision-making in partially observable stochastic systems by integrating diffusion-based time series forecasting models in Model Predictive Control algorithms. In our approach, a diffusion-based time series forecasting model is used to probabilistically estimate the evolution of the system's stochastic components. These forecasts are then incorporated into MPC algorithms to estimate future trajectories and optimize action selection under the uncertainty of the future. We evaluate the framework on the task of energy arbitrage, where a Battery Energy Storage System participates in the day-ahead electricity market of the New York state. Experimental results indicate that our model-based approach with a diffusion-based forecaster significantly outperforms both implementations with classical forecasting methods and model-free reinforcement learning baselines.