Analysing drivers and interdependencies in European electricity markets using XAI

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 17 Jun 2026] Analysing drivers and interdependencies in European electricity markets using XAI Antoine Pesenti, Aidan O'Sullivan Electricity markets are inherently complex systems characterised by strong nonlinearities, high-dimensional interactions, and increasing interdependence across regions. While deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated strong predictive capabilities for electricity prices, their lack of interpretability limits their usefulness for understanding the underlying drivers of price formation. This paper addresses this gap by combining DNN models with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques to analyse the determinants of electricity prices across 39 European bidding zones. We employ SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to quantify feature contributions and apply and extend SSHAP, an aggregation framework to improve interpretability in high-dimensional settings. The analysis identifies that renewable energy sources, particularly solar, play a disproportionately important role in price formation despite their lower share in total power generation. Gas prices remain a dominant and consistent driver across electricity markets, while interconnections significantly shape price dynamics, highlighting the strong interdependence of European electricity systems. In addition, a synthetic EU-wide electricity market is constructed to explore the counterfactual scenario of a fully integrated market with a single price. Comments: 12 pages Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); General Economics (econ.GN) Cite as: arXiv:2606.19118 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.19118v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.19118 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Antoine Pesenti [view email] [v1] Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:32:39 UTC (5,216 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG econ econ.GN q-fin q-fin.EC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)