Short-term load forecasting is of major interest for the restructured environment of the electricity market. Accurate load forecasting is essential for effective power system operation, but electricity load is non-linear with a high level of volatility. Predicting such complex signals requires suitable prediction tools. This paper proposes a hybrid forecast strategy including novel feature selection technique, and a complex forecast engine based on a new intelligent algorithm. The electricity load signal is first filtered by feature selection technique to select appropriate candidates as input for the forecast engine. Then, the proposed two stage forecast engine is implemented based on ridgelet and Elman neural networks. All forecast engine parameters are chosen based on a novel intelligent algorithm to improve its accuracy and capability. Different electricity markets were considered as test cases to compare the proposed method with several current algorithms. Additionally, the proposed forecasting model measures the absolute forecasting errors in this work (among seven types of measurements i.e., absolute forecasting errors, measures based on percentage errors, symmetric errors, measures based on relative errors, scaled errors, relative measures and other error measures). The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.