The multiple linear regression method is still an interesting forecasting option because of its
simplicity. Mohamed and Bodger [11] used a multiple linear regression model to forecast the
electricity consumption of New Zealand where the independent variables were gross domestic product
(GDP), electricity price and population. The genetic algorithm (GA) was integrated with an ANN in
the study of Azadeh, Ghaderi, Tavedian and Saberi [12] to forecast the monthly electricity demand in
Iran. The estimated errors (MAPE) were used as the measure of errors, while the results showed that
the MAPE of the proposed method was less than those of regression and time series models.
Moreover, Azadeh, Ghaderi and Sohrabkhani [13] also assessed the performance of an ANN model to
forecast monthly electricity consumption by utilizing analysis of variance (ANOVA). Four treatments
of the experiment were: actual data, time series, ANN and simulation-based ANN. According to the
empirical study, ANN was superior to the time series and simulation-based ANN.