Driver Identification and PCA Augmented Selection Shrinkage Framework for Nordic System Price Forecasting

The System Price (SP) of the Nordic electricity market serves as a key reference for financial hedge contracts such as Electricity Price Area Differentials (EPADs) and other risk management instruments. Therefore, the identification of drivers and the accurate forecasting of SP are essential for market participants to design effective hedging strategies. This paper develops a systematic framework that combines interpretable drivers analysis with robust forecasting methods. It proposes an interpretable feature engineering algorithm to identify the main drivers of the Nordic SP based on a novel combination of K-means clustering, Multiple Seasonal-Trend Decomposition (MSTD), and Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model. Then, it applies principal component analysis (PCA) to the identified data matrix, which is adapted to the downstream task of price forecasting to mitigate the issue of imperfect multicollinearity in the data. Finally, we propose a multi-forecast selection-shrinkage algorithm for Nordic SP forecasting, which selects a subset of complementary forecast models based on their bias-variance tradeoff at the ensemble level and then computes the optimal weights for the retained forecast models to minimize the error variance of the combined forecast. Using historical data from the Nordic electricity market, we demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms individual input models uniformly, robustly, and significantly, while maintaining a comparable computational cost. Notably, our systematic framework produces superior results using simple input models, outperforming the state-of-the-art Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT). Furthermore, we show that our approach also exceeds the performance of several well-established practical forecast combination methods.