Short-Term Electrical Load Forecasting Based on XGBoost Model

Forecasting electricity consumption is one of the most important scientific and practical tasks in the field of electric power engineering. The forecast accuracy directly impacts the operational efficiency of the entire power system and the performance of electricity markets. This paper proposes algorithms for source data preprocessing and tuning XGBoost models to obtain the most accurate forecast profiles. The initial data included hourly electricity consumption volumes and meteorological conditions in the power system of the Republic of Tatarstan for the period from 2013 to 2025. The novelty of the study lies in defining and justifying the optimal model training period and developing a new evaluation metric for assessing model efficiency—financial losses in Balancing Energy Market operations. It was shown that the optimal depth of the training dataset is 10 years. It was also demonstrated that the use of traditional metrics (MAE, MAPE, MSE, etc.) as loss functions during training does not always yield the most effective model for market conditions. The MAPE, MAE, and financial loss values for the most accurate model, evaluated on validation data from the first 5 months of 2025, were 1.411%, 38.487 MWh, and 16,726,062 RUR, respectively. Meanwhile, the metrics for the most commercially effective model were 1.464%, 39.912 MWh, and 15,961,596 RUR, respectively.