A generous donation from Professor Tao Hong has funded this award for papers on energy forecasting published in the International Journal of Forecasting. Every two years the IJF editors select the “best” paper on energy forecasting to have been published in the IJF within the previous two-year period. The IIF Tao Hong Award consists of US$1000 and an engraved plaque. Additional papers may receive Outstanding Paper Awards.
The IIF Tao Hong Award for research in energy forecasting goes to Pierre Gaillard, Yannig Goude and Raphael Nedellec for their paper Additive models and robust aggregation for GEFCom2014 probabilistic electric load and electricity price forecasting, IJF, 2016. This EDF R&D team won the load and price forecasting tracks of the GEFCom2014 competition. The load forecasting track, in particular, was very competitive. The paper touches three different methods, one used for both tracks (quantile generalized additive model), a combination method, and a sparse regression based method. All of these three approaches are novel and can be considered as the state of the art today.
The award committee decided to also acknowledge the paper by Jaromir Benes, Marcelle Chauvet, Ondra Kamenik, Michael Kumhof, Douglas Laxton, Susanna Mursula, and Jack Selody, The future of oil: Geology versus technology, IJF, 2015. This paper takes a general perspective on how to forecast oil prices and oil output that nests both economic and geologic views. The authors put their model to various uses, focusing on the forecasting, but also using their model to interpret what type of shocks explain oil price hikes and to explore the links between oil and the macro-economy. This paper was given an “Outstanding paper” certificate.