BigDEAL Students Winning NPower Gas Demand Forecasting Challenge 2015

RWE npower hosted its second forecasting challenge in 2015 last month. The topic was ex post 6-month ahead daily gas demand forecasting with hourly weather information.

44 teams worldwide joined the competition, of which 22 were from U.K. Three of my students (Jingrui Xie, Bidong Liu and Ying Chen) formed the team BigDEAL@UNCC to join the competition. 

This morning the final leaderboard was released. 32 teams completed all three rounds of competition. I was very pleased to see another outstanding performance of the BigDEAL team:

• Ranking #3 on the average MAPE of the three rounds. The MAPE values of the top three teams were 6.05% (Geert Scholma), 6.06% (Silver Lightning) and 6.31% (BigDEAL@UNCC). BigDEAL was also #3 in the npower electricity demand forecasting challenge earlier this year. 
• One of the only two teams ranking top 5 through the competition. The rankings of BigDEAL in the three rounds were #4, #2 and #3. The rankings of the other team Silver Lightning were #2, #4 and #4. 

Hopefully npower can make this forecasting challenge an annual event. Congratulations, BigDEAL team!