From our journey to build forecasting as a feature within FlexMeasures: Good forecasting models are usually the result of small iterations.
Here is one of those iterations: the image shows the improvement from telling your model during training (and in production) what days are public holidays.
Forecasts trained without and with annotated holidays (here: Ascension Day)
In this example, energy prices are much lower than on a normal Thursday afternoon. That’s because it is Ascension Day’s afternoon (and thus much lower energy demand).
The model we trained with knowledge what a holiday is catched this correctly.
Now, integrating a correct list of holidays for all regions of the world (or maybe Europe, to start with), is the next challenge 🙂 But we already solved that, too.
In FlexMeasures, training a forecaster with holidays as regressor is shipping soon (in v1.0, now already on main).