GEFCom2012 hierarchical load forecasting: Gradient boosting machines and Gaussian processes

This report discusses methods for forecasting hourly loads of a US utility as part of the load forecasting track of the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012 hosted on Kaggle. The methods described (gradient boosting machines and Gaussian processes) are generic machine learning/regression algorithms, and few domain-specific adjustments were made. Despite this, the algorithms were able to produce highly competitive predictions, which can hopefully inspire more refined techniques to compete with state-of-the-art load forecasting methodologies.