Since there are no empirical or exact rules to derive the best forecasting model, the most
appropriate one was selected by choosing the model with the lowest error. Mostly, the error margins of
the candidate forecasting methods were slightly different. Moreover, a handful of works have
contributed to compare whether there was a significant difference between the errors from each
method. In this research, the performance of ANN approach and the traditional methods, i.e., ARIMA
and MLR, was assessed and compared using a set of data regarding the total electricity consumption in
Thailand from 1986 to 2010. For MLR, some critical factors such as the amount of exports and stock
index which significantly affected the consumption were included in the forecasting model. The error
(MAPE) from each method was calculated and used to rank the top performer, followed by the
runner-ups. Afterwards, the Wilcoxson sign rank test and paired t-test were utilized to compare the
errors from each pair of methods.