In this manuscript, we develop Bayesian statistics tools to forecast the French electricity load. We first prove the asymptotic normality of the posterior distribution (Bernstein-von Mises theorem) for the piecewise linear regression model used to describe the heating effect and the consistency of the Bayes estimator. We then build a a hierarchical informative prior to help improve the quality of the predictions for a high dimension model with a short dataset. We typically show, with two examples involving the non metered EDF customers, that the method we propose allows a more robust estimation of the model with regard to the lack of data. Finally, we study a new nonlinear dynamic model to predict the electricity load online. We develop a particle filter algorithm to estimate the model et compare the predictions obtained with operationnal predictions from EDF.
Bayesian methods for electricity load forecasting